

















^--0^ 



^' 



==^ 

















' r> ' o " o ^ ^^ 



60 1^ 



BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

T^EW YORK . BOSTON • CHICAGO 
""atHItA . SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON . BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA. Lm 

TORONTO 



BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 



PRELUDE TO A PHILOSOPHY 
OF THE FUTURE 



BY 
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 



AUTHORISED TRANSLATION 
BY HELEN ZIMMERN 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1907 

All rights reserved 



^. 



A-^ 



^^-^ 



\ 



a^ 



A 



^/Mif(> 



^ .f 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Preface ---..-. i 

CHAP. 

I. Prejudices of Philosophers -. . 5 

II. The Free Spirit - - - - 35 

III. The Religious Mood - - - 63 

IV. Apophthegms and Interludes - - 85 
V. The Natural History of Morals - 103 

VI. We Scholars - - - - - 133 

VII. Our Virtues - - - - - 159 

VIII. Peoples and Countries - • - 191 

IX. What is Noble? - - - - 223 

Epode: From Lofty Mountains • • 26s 



INTRODUCTION TO THE 
TRANSLATION. 

Here, in spite of its name, is one of the most 
serious, profound, and original philosophical works. 
It offers a feast of good things to the morally and 
intellectually fastidious, which will take long to 
exhaust. There is really something new in the 
book — much that is new ! Burke says, in his 
" Reflections on the Revolution in France " (p. 128), 
" We [Englishmen] know that we have made no 
discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to 
be made in morality." The latter statement, which 
still represents the general views of Englishmen, is 
now proved to be entirely mistaken. Discoveries 
have now been made in the realm of morals, which 
are perhaps even more practically important than 
all the discoveries in physical science ; and it is to 
Nietzsche especially that we are indebted for those 
discoveries, which are set forth, in part at least, in 
this volume — the very discoveries, in fact, which 
Burke himself required, in order to give a satis- 
factory answer to the French Revolutionists. 

As, however, many who might otherwise ap- 
preciate the book, may stumble over its name 
at the threshold, it should perhaps be explained 
that the astounding and portentous designation, 
" Beyond Good and Evil," applies to it properly 



VlU INTRODUCTION. 

only from the false point of view of its pseudo- 
moral opponents ; as, however, it is a very striking 
expression, such as is always wanted for the title of 
a book, it has been appropriated for the purpose, 
notwithstanding the fact that to ordinary minds, 
and in ordinary language, it implies the very reverse 
of what the book teaches. Of course, there is a 
certain amount of truth in the designation, and 
therefore a justification for it : Nietzsche's position 
is beyond the spurious " good " and the spurious 
" evil " of the prevalent slave-morality, which 
deteriorates humanity ; but he takes a firm stand 
on the genuine " good " and the genuine " bad " of 
master-morality, which promotes the advancement 
of the human race. This is so obvious from a 
glance at the book that it is scarcely necessary to 
refer to Nietzsche's express statement of the fact in 
the " Genealogy of Morals," i. 17. He there says 
expressly, with reference to " the dangerous watch- 
word inscribed on the outside of his last book : 
* Beyond Good and Evil '" — " at any rate, it does 
not mean, * Beyond Good and Bad.' " 

(When so many reproaches have been unjustly 
heaped upon Nietzsche and his disciples, under the 
false pretence that they repudiate true morality, it 
is diflficult to resist the opportunity to turn round 
upon those maligners parenthetically, and point 
out who it is that is really beyond good and bad 
from the true moral standpoint — is it perhaps those 
very maligners themselves, whom Nietzsche with 
his acuteness has touched on the quick? The 
Kirkcaldyan gospel of " The Wealth of Nations," 
under which we all live more or less, and which in 



INTRODUCTION. IX 

puerile fashion the political economists still repeat 
almost by rote, not only implicitly disregards 
morals, but on many occasions boldly and explicitly 
professes to have nothing to do with them, in fact, 
professes to be altogether beyond good and bad 
in the ordinary sense of these words. [See, for 
example, Walker's works on " Political Economy," 
and many other writers on the subject] And is 
not this '' Political Economy " the unquestioned 
creed of almost all the non-Socialists who condemn 
Nietzsche ? Even the Konigsbergian gospel, with 
its " Sublime Moral Law," and its " Categorical 
Imperative," has allied and adjusted itself to the 
Kirkcaldyan gospel of universal, insatiable, ex- 
clusivelyindividualistic, and absolutelyunscrupulous 
Mammonism. The Benthamites, the Spencerites, 
and the Neo-Hegelianites or Greenites, have had 
still less difficulty in forming an alliance with 
Mammonism, even in its worst aspects. All those 
"good people," therefore, who are so ready to 
condemn others, have actually themselves taken up 
a position beyond good and bad in the disreputable 
sense of these terms, unlike Nietzsche, who occupies 
the only justifiable position from the true moral 
standpoint.) 

One or two of the leading points in Nietzsche's 
philosophy should perhaps be mentioned — but we 
cannot touch on the numerous details, which may, 
however, often be deduced from the leading 
principles here indicated : — 

I. Nietzsche especially makes the highest ex- 
cellence of society the ethical end ; whereas almost 
all other moralists adopt "ends" which lead directly 



X INTRODUCTION. 

or indirectly, to the degeneration of society. As a 
necessary consequence, he favours a true aristocracy 
as the best means for elevating the human race to 
supermen. 

2. Instead of advocating " equal and inalienable 
rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," 
for which there is at present such an outcry (a regime 
which necessarily elevates fools and knaves, and 
lowers the honest and intelligent), Nietzsche 
advocates simple justice — to individuals and families 
according to their meritSy according to their worth 
to society ; not equal rights, therefore, but unequal 
rights, and inequality in advantages generally, 
approximately proportionate to deserts : con- 
sequently therefore, a genuinely superior ruling 
class at one end of the social scale, and an actually 
inferior ruled class, with slaves at its basis, at the 
opposite social extreme. 

3. Unlike social evolutionists generally, who 
either stop short in their quest, or neglect Newton's 
rule of philosophising, which prohibits the assigning 
of superfluous, unknown, or imaginary causes, 
Nietzsche explains social phenomena by familiar, 
natural causes, assigning to them a human, all-too- 
human origin, and accounting for them especially, 
like Larochefoucauld, as a result of the self-interest 
and self-preservative instinct of individuals and 
classes — that is to say, practically, in conformity to 
the true principles of evolution, which recognise in 
everything a conscious or sub-conscious will to 
persist and evolve — a matter which Darwin certainly 
overlooked too much in his imperfect attempts to 
explain moral and social evolution. 



INTRODUCTION. XI 

4. One of Nietzsche's most important services 
has been to furnish a true philosophy of the more 
modern period of history, during the last 2,000 
years. As " the first psychologist of Christianity," 
he has successfully accounted for the anomalous 
phenomenon of the Christian religion — the special 
embodiment of slave-morality — by showing that it 
is an artful device, consciously and sub-consciously 
evolved for the self-preservation and advantage of 
the inferior classes of society, who have thus, to the 
detriment of the race, gained an abnormal and 
temporary ascendency over the better class of men, 
to whom the mastership belongs, under the sway 
of the normally prevailing pagan or master-morality 
which favours the advance of mankind. 

Nietzsche, therefore, differs radically from most 
of the leaders of English thought with regard to 
the great questions of ethics and religion. Spencer, 
Huxley, Alfred R. Wallace, Leslie Stephen, A. J. 
Balfour, Benjamin Kidd, Frederic Harrison, Grant 
Allen, T. H. Green, Andrew Lang, and their 
followers, though differing in many points among 
themselves, seem all to have a strong instinctive 
aversion to recognise self-interest as a leading 
factor in the evolution of morals and religion ; 
indeed, some of the mystifiers among them, es- 
pecially Green's time-serving followers, with their 
fixed idea of a dotard Deity (or God-aping devil ?) 
devolving himself as fast as possible into constitu- 
tionalism, democracy, and anarchy, would almost 
sooner gaze on the Gorgon's head than contemplate 
the possibility of such an illuminating, ready, and 
natural explanation. Most of those leaders of 



Xll INTRODUCTION. 

English thought are also equally averse to recognise 
that the true ethical end must be the highest ex- 
cellence of society. It would involve in many 
people such an upsetting of their intellectual furni- 
ture to admit Nietzsche's new ideas — it would also 
involve ultimately the upsetting of cherished in- 
stitutions which are profitable to them, or to which 
they have become satisfactorily adjusted : many 
responsible people, therefore, prefer to barricade 
their intellects against such new and danger- 
threatening ideas, which are far more revolutionary, 
or rather counter-revolutionary, than Socialism ! 
The great mass even of cultured people in England 
seem unable to cross the pontes asinorum of morals : 
they cannot grasp the related facts that what is 
good for one is not necessarily good for society at 
large, and that many people, in spite of Socrates, 
instinctively choose the bad^ when it is most profit- 
able to themselves. All popular and superficial 
writers, however, and all demagogues, take for 
granted the opposite doctrines — namely, that what- 
ever is advantageous to any person, be he the most 
wicked and worthless creature on the face of the 
earth, is therefore necessarily for the good of the 
whole community ; and that every one instinctively 
chooses the right course as soon as he knows it. 

Some English writers, however, approximate 
pretty closely to Nietzsche on some of the points 
in his philosophy : for example, Emerson, Carlyle, 
Kingdon Clifford, Samuel Butler, Sir Alfred Lyall, 
Stuart-Glennie, Karl Pearson, and doubtless many 
others. None of these writers have, however, elabo- 
rated the whole subject as Nietzsche has done. 



INTRODUCTION. Xlll 

Bernard Shaw, as is well known, has also many- 
points in common with Nietzsche. F. C. S. Schiller 
should likewise be named here, whose " Prag- 
matism," about which there is so much noise at 
present, has obviously been largely influenced by 
Nietzsche's writings. H. G. Wells's semi-serious 
writings seem like a coarse and crooked refraction 
of the ideas of Nietzsche, whom he was accustomed 
to malign. 

To be sure, all prudent, worldly wise men follow 
more or less approximately the practice which 
Nietzsche teaches, notwithstanding the opposite 
principles which they perhaps profess to hold : 
they do not willingly allow equal rights to knaves 
and fools to do as they like, much less are they 
willing to practise self-sacrifice for the sake of the 
most worthless specimens of humanity. Not even 
the special champions and forlorn hope of these 
ideas — the secularists, "rationalists," ethiculturists 
and " philanthropists " — are inclined to practise 
themselves to any great extent, the slave-morality 
which they preach to others. There is nowadays, 
also, a healthy tendency in the clergy of the 
established churches to send people to hell for 
wickedness, rather than for unbelief as was done 
formerly, and is still done by the evangelical party. 
The great majority of people, however, hold, or 
pretend to hold, principles which are altogether in- 
consistent with their practice — in fact they are not 
rational beings in the realm of morals (or are their 
" principles " meant only for the practice of other 
people but not for themselves ?). The great advance 
which Nietzsche has made is that he has harmonised 



XIV INTRODUCTION. 

moral theory and practice — and thus rationalised 
morality. 

As regards its relation to Nietzsche's other works, 
this book was meant on the one hand to explain 
more clearly in prose form the ideas expressed 
poetically and somewhat obscurely in his previous 
book, " Thus Spake Zarathustra " ; and on the other 
hand, as its sub-title indicates, it was meant as a 
prologue or prelude to his great, never-completed 
work on which he was then engaged, " The Will to 
Power : An Attempt at a Transvaluation of all 
Values." The circumstances under which the work 
was written are very fully set forth in Chapter XXX. 
(pp. 588-635) of Das Leben Nietzsches, With the 
exception of the epode, the book was written partly 
in the summer of 1885 at Sils-Maria, and partly in 
the following winter at Nice. It was during this 
period that Nietzsche's sister was married and went 
with her husband to Paraguay, thus leaving her 
brother more solitary than ever. The spirit of 
solitude which broods over the book, discloses 
itself especially in the last chapter. The manu- 
script was sent to the printer in June 1886, and the 
book was published in the September following at 
Nietzsche's own expense. 

Nietzsche was personally acquainted with Miss 
Helen Zimmern — her important book on Schopen- 
hauer brought her under his notice — and, as appears 
from his letters, he had her in view as a translator 
of his works : this led her to undertake the task of 
rendering this volume into English. A good deal 
of labour has been spent in making the version as 
satisfactory as possible. Those who still find im- 



INTRODUCTION. XV 

perfections in it must not lay the whole blame for 
them upon Miss Zimmern — after the fashion of a 
Chicago university professor who in " The Dial " 
was inclined to lay the whole blame for imperfec- 
tions in the first Nietzsche volumes on one of the 
translators, exonerating the editor, the Nietzsche 
Archive, the printer, and the other translators. We 
here take the opportunity to thank Mr Alfred E. 
Zimmern of New College, Oxford, and a German 
friend of his, for reading very carefully some of the 
first proofs and suggesting improvements. Dr 
Oscar Levy has also read many of the proofs and 
made valuable suggestions. 

The friends of the cause are, however, still further 
indebted to Dr Oscar Levy — whose name is well 
known to students of Nietzschean literature by his 
book, " The Revival of Aristocracy " — for enabling 
the publication of Nietzsche's works to be resumed 
once more. His patronage of the cause stands out 
in pleasing contrast to the indifference and hostility 
to Nietzsche of some of the English professional 
" philosophers," who should have been the first to 
welcome the new knowledge, had they been true 
men. Other volumes of Nietzsche's works will be 
issued as soon as possible. 

THOMAS COMMON. 
8 Whitehouse Terrace, 

CORSTORPHINEj N.B., 

2^rd August 1907. 



PREFACE. 

Supposing that Truth is a woman — what then? 
Is there not ground for suspecting that all philo- 
sophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, 
have failed to understand women — that the terrible 
seriousness and clumsy importunity with which 
they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, 
have been unskilled and unseemly methods for 
winning a woman ? Certainly she has never allowed 
herself to be won ; and at present every kind of 
dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien — if^ 
indeed, it stands at all ! For there are scoffers 
who maintain that it has fallen, that all dogma lies 
on the ground — nay more, that it is at its last gasp. 
But to speak seriously, there are good grounds for 
hoping that all dogmatising in philosophy, whatever 
solemn, whatever conclusive and decided airs it has 
assumed, may have been only a noble p uerili sm 
and tyronism ; and probably the time is at hand 
when it will be once and again understood what 
has actually sufficed for the basis of such imposing 
and absolute philosophical edifices as the dog- 
matists have hitherto reared : perhaps some popular 
superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul- 
superstition, which, in the form of subject- and ego- 
superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief); 

A 



2 PREFACE. 

perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the 
part of grammar, or an audacious generalisation 
of very restricted, very personal, very human — all- 
too-human facts. The philosophy of the dogma- 
tists, it is to be hoped, was only a promise for 
thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in 
still earlier times, in the service of which probably 
more labour, gold, acuteness, and patience have 
been spent than on any actual science hitherto : 
we owe to it, and to its " super-terrestrial " preten- 
sions in Asia and Egypt, the grand style of 
architecture. It seems that in order to inscribe 
themselves upon the heart of humanity with ever- 
lasting claims, all great things have first to wander 
about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring 
caricatures : dogmatic philosophy has been a 
caricature of this kind — for instance, the Vedanta 
doctrine in Asia, and Platonism in Europe. Let us 
not be ungrateful to it, although it must certainly 
be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and 
the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a 
dogmatist error — namely, Plato's invention of Pure 
Spirit and the Good in Itself. But now when it 
has been surmounted, when Europe, rid of this 
nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at 
least enjoy a healthier — sleep, we, whose duty is 
wakefulness itself, are the heirs of all the strength 
which the struggle against this error has fostered. 
It amounted to the very inversion of truth, and the 
denial oi^^ perspective — the fundamental condition 
— of life, to speak of Spirit and the Good as Plato 
spoke of them ; indeed one might ask, as a physician : 
" How did such a malady attack that finest product 



PREFACE. 3 

of antiquity, Plato ? Had the wicked Socrates 
really corrupted him? Was Socrates after all a 
corrupter of youths, and deserved his hemlock ? " 
But the struggle against Plato, or — to speak 
plainer, and for the " people " — the struggle against 
the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of 
Christianity (for Christianity is Platonism for the 
"people"), produced in Europe a magnificent 
tension of soul, such as had not existed anywhere 
previously ; with such a tensely-strained bow one 
can now aim at the furthest goals. As a matter of 
fact, the European feels this tension as a state of 
distress, and twice attempts have been made in 
grand style to unbend the bow : once by means of 
Jesuitism, and the second time by means of demo- 
cratic enlightenment — which, with the aid of liberty 
of the press and newspaper-reading, might, in fact, 
bring it about that the spirit would not so easily 
find itself in " distress " ! (The Germans invented 
gunpowder — all credit to them ! but they again 
made things square — they invented printing.) 
But we, who are neither Jesuits, nor democrats, 
nor even sufficiently Germans, we good Europeans^ 
and free, very free spirits — we have it still, all the 
distress of spirit and all the tension of its bow! 
And perhaps also the arrow, the duty, and, who 
knows ? the goal to aim at. . , . 

Sils-Maria, Upper Engadine, 
June i88s 



BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 



FIRST CHAPTER. 
PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. 



The Will to Truth, which is to tempt us to many 
a hazardous enterprise, the famous Truthfulness 
of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken 
with respect, what questions has this Will to Truth 
not laid before us ! What strange, perplexing, 
questionable questions ! It is already a long story ; 
yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced. 
Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose 
patience, and turn impatiently away? That this 
Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves ? 
Who is it really that puts questions to us here? 
What really is this "Will to Truth" in us? In 
fact we made a long halt at the question as to the 
origin of this Will — until at last we came to an 
absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental 
question. We inquired about the value of this Will. 
Granted that we want the truth : why not rather 
untruth? And uncertainty ? Even ignorance ? The 



6 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

problem of the value of truth presented itself before 
us — or was it we who presented ourselves before 
the problem ? Which of us is the CEdipus here ? 
Which the Sphinx ? It would seem to be a rendez- 
vous of questions and notes of interrogation. And 
could it be believed that it at last seems to us as if 
the problem had never been propounded before, as 
if we were the first to discern it, get a sight of it, 
and risk raising it. For there is risk in raising it, 
perhaps there is no greater risk. 

2. 

*^ How could anything originate out of its op- 
posite? For example, truth out of error? or the 
Will to Truth out of the will to deception ? or the 
generous deed out of selfishness? or the pure 
sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetous- 
ness ? Such genesis is impossible ; whoever dreams 
of it is a fool, nay, worse than a fool ; things of the 
highest value must have a different origin, an origin 
of their own — in this transitory, seductive, illusory, 
paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity, 
they cannot have their source. But rather in the 
lap of Being, in the intransitory, in the concealed 
God, in the * Thing-in-itself ' — there must be their 
source, and nowhere else ! " — This mode of reason- 
ing discloses the typical prejudice by which meta- 
physicians of all times can be recognised, this mode 
of valuation is at the back of all their logical proce- 
dure; through this "belief" of theirs, the}^ exert 
themselves for their "knowledge," for something 
that is in the end solemnly christened " the Truth." 
The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHER^ g 

belief in antitheses of values. It never occurrea ^^^ 
to the wariest of them to doubt here on the \ ^^ 
threshold (where doubt, however, was most neces- 
sary) ; though they had made a solemn vow, " de 
omnibus dubitandum'^ For it may be doubted, 
firstly, whether antitheses exist at all ; and secondly, 
whether the popular valuations and antitheses of 
value upon which metaphysicians have set their 
seal, are not perhaps merely superficial estimates, 
merely provisional perspectives, besides being 
probably made from some corner, perhaps from 
below — "frog perspectives," as it were, to borrow 
an expression current among painters. In spite of 
all the value which may belong to the true, the 
positive, and the unselfish, it might be possible 
that a higher and more fundamental value for life 
generally should be assigned to pretence, to the will 
to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity. It might 
even be possible that what constitutes the value of 
those good and respected things, consists precisely 
in their being insidiously related, knotted, and 
crocheted to these evil and apparently opposed 
things — perhaps even in being essentially identical 
with them. Perhaps ! But who wishes to concern 
himself with such dangerous " Perhapses " ! For 
that investigation one must await the advent of a 
new order of philosophers, such as will have other 
tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto 
prevalent — philosophers of the dangerous " Per- 
haps " in every sense of the term. And to speak 
in all seriousness, I see such new philosophers 
beginning to appear. 



BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

6 

prob^ ^' 

Having kept a sharp eye on philosophers, and 

having read between their lines long enough, I now 
say to myself that the greater part of conscious 
thinking must be counted amongst the instinctive 
functions, and it is so even in the case of philo- 
sophical thinking ; one has here to learn anew, as 
one learned anew about heredity and " innateness." 
As little as the act of birth comes into considera- 
tion in the whole process and continuation of 
heredity, just as little is " being-conscious '' opposed 
to the instinctive in any decisive sense ; the greater 
part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is 
secretly influenced by his instincts, and forced into 
definite channels. And behind all logic and its 
seeming sovereignty of movement, there are valua- 
tions, or to speak more plainly, physiological de- 
mands, for the maintenance of a definite mode of 
life. For example, that the certain is worth more 
than the uncertain, that illusion is less valuable 
than " truth " : such valuations, in spite of their 
regulative importance for us^ might notwithstanding 
be only superficial valuations, special kinds of 
niaiseriey such as may be necessary for the main- 
tenance of beings such as ourselves. Supposing, 
in effect, that man is not just the "measure of 
things." . . . 

4. 

The falseness of an opinion is not for us any 
objection to it : it is here, perhaps, that our new 
language sounds most strangely. The question is, 
how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving. 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. 9 

Species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing ; and 
we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the 
falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments 
a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us ; 
that without a recognition of logical fictions, with- 
out a comparison of reality with the purely imagined 
world of the absolute and immutable, without a 
constant counterfeiting of the world by means of 
numbers, man could not live — that the renuncia- 
tion of false opinions would be a renunciation of 
life, a negation of life. To recognise untruth as a 
condition of life : that is certainly to impugn the 
traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, 
and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has 
thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil. 

5. 
That which causes philosophers to be regarded 
half-distrustfuUy and half-mockingly, is not the 
oft-repeated discovery how innocent they are — 
how often and easily they make mistakes and lose 
their way, in short, how childish and childlike they 
are, — but that there is not enough honest dealing 
with them, whereas they all raise a loud and virtuous 
outcry when the problem of truthfulness is even 
hinted at in the remotest manner. They all pose 
as though their real opinions had been discovered 
and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, 
pure, divinely indifferent dialectic (in contrast to 
all sorts of mystics, who, fairer and foolisher, talk 
of "inspiration") ; whereas, in fact, a prejudiced pro- 
position, idea, or " suggestion," which is generally 
their heart's desire abstracted and refined, is de- 



lO BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

fended by them with arguments sought out after 
the event They are all advocates who do not wish 
to be regarded as such, generally astute defenders, 
also, of their prejudices, which they dub "truths," 
— and very far from having the conscience which 
bravely admits this to itself; very far from having 
the good taste of the courage which goes so far 
as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn friend 
or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule. 
The spectacle of the Tartuffery of old Kant, equally 
stiff and decent, with which he entices us into the 
dialectic by-ways that lead (more correctly mislead) 
to his " categorical imperative " — makes us fastidious 
ones smile, we who find no small amusement in 
spying out the subtle tricks of old moralists and 
ethical preachers. Or, still more so, the hocus- 
pocus of mathematical form, by means of which 
Spinoza has as it were clad his philosophy in mail 
and mask — in fact, the "love of his wisdom," to 
translate the term fairly and squarely — in order 
thereby to strike terror at once into the heart of 
the assailant who should dare to cast a glance on 
that invincible maiden, that Pallas Athene : — how 
much of personal timidity and vulnerability does 
this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray ! 

6. 

It has gradually become clear to me what every 
great philosophy up till now has consisted of — 
namely, the confession of its originator, and a species 
of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography; and 
moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in 
every philosophy has constituted the true vital 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. II 

germ out of which the entire plant has always 
grown. Indeed, to understand how the abstrusest 
metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been 
arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to first ask 
oneself: "What morality do they (or does he) 
aim at?" Accordingly, I do not believe that an 
" impulse to knowledge " is the father of philosophy ; 
but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only 
made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) 
as an instrument. But whoever considers the funda- 
mental impulses of man with a view to determining 
how far they may have here acted as inspiring genii 
(or as demons and cobolds), will find that they 
have all practised philosophy at one time or another, 
and that each one of them would have been only 
too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of 
existence and the legitimate lord over all the other 
impulses. For every impulse is imperious, and as 
such^ attempts to philosophise. To be sure, in the 
case of scholars, in the case of really scientific men, 
it may be otherwise — " better," if you will ; there 
there may really be such a thing as an " impulse to 
knowledge," some kind of small, independent clock- 
work, which, when well wound up, works away in- 
dustriously to that end, without the rest of the 
scholarly impulses taking any material part therein*. 
The actual " interests " of the scholar, therefore, are 
generally in quite another direction — in the family, 
perhaps, or in money-making, or in politics ; it is, 
in fact, almost indifferent at what point of research 
his little machine is placed, and whether the hopeful 
young worker becomes a good philologist, a mush- 
room specialist, or a chemist ; he is not characterised 



12 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

by becoming this or that. In the philosopher, on 
the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal; 
and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and < 
decisive testimony as to who he 2>,— that is to say, in 
what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand 
to each other. 

7. 

How malicious philosophers can be ! I know of 
nothing more stinging than the joke Epicurus took 
the liberty of making on Plato and the Platonists : 
he called them Dianysiokolakes. In its original 
sense, and on the face of it, the word signifies 
"Flatterers of Dionysius" — consequently, tyrants' 
accessories and lick-spittles ; besides this, however, 
it is as much as to say, " They are all actors^ there 
is nothing genuine about them " (for Dionysiokolax 
was a popular name for an actor). And the latter 
is really the malignant reproach that Epicurus cast 
upon Plato : he was annoyed by the grandiose 
manner, the mise en scene style of which Plato and 
his scholars were masters — of which Epicurus was 
not a master ! He, the old school-teacher of Samos, 
who sat concealed in his little garden at Athens 
and wrote three hundred books, perhaps out of rage 
and ambitious envy of Plato, who knows ! Greece 
took a hundred years to find out who the garden- 
god Epicurus really was. Did she ever find out ? 

8. 

There is a point in every philosophy at which the 
" conviction " of the philosopher appears on the 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. 1 3 

scene; or, to put it in the words of an ancient 
mystery : 

Adventavit asinus^ 

Pulcher et fortissimus. 

9. 

You desire to live " according to Nature " ? Oh, 
you noble Stoics, what fraud of words ! Imagine to 
yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extra- 
vagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or 
consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruit- 
ful and barren and uncertain : imagine to yourselves 
indifference as a power — how couldyowXw^ in accord- 
ance with such indifference ? To live — is not that 
just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? 
Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being 
limited, endeavouring to be different ? And granted 
that your imperative, " living according to Nature," 
means actually the same as "living according to 
life " — how could you do differently ? Why should 
you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, 
and must be ? In reality, however, it is quite other- 
wise with you : while you pretend to read with 
rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want 
something quite the contrary, you extraordinary 
stage-players and self-deluders ! In your pride you 
wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to 
Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein ; you 
insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," 
and would like everything to be made after your 
own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and 
generalisation of Stoicism ! With all your love for 
truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persist- 



14 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

ently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature 
falsely^ that is to say, Stoically, that you are no 
longer able to see it otherwise — and to crown all, 
some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the 
Bedlamite hope that because you are able to tyran- 
nise over yourselves — Stoicism is self- tyranny — 
Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannised over : 
is not the Stoic dipart of Nature ? . . . But this is 
an old and everlasting story : what happened in old 
times with the Stoics still happens to-day, as soon 
as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It 
always creates the world in its own image ; it can- 
not do otherwise ; philosophy is this tyrannical im- 
pulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will 
to "creation of the world," the will to the causa 
prima. 

ID. 

The eagerness and subtlety, I should even say 
craftiness, with which the problem of " the real and 
the apparent world" is dealt with at present 
throughout Europe, furnishes food for thought and 
attention ; and he who hears only a " Will to 
Truth " in the background, and nothing else, cannot 
certainly boast of the sharpest ears. In rare and 
isolated cases, it may really have happened that 
such a Will to Truth — a certain extravagant and 
adventurous pluck, a metaphysician's ambition of 
the forlorn hope — has participated therein : that 
which in the end always prefers a handful of 
" certainty " to a whole cartload of beautiful possi- 
bilities ; there may even be puritanical fanatics of 
conscience, who prefer to put their last trust in a 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. IS 

sure nothing, rather than in an uncertain something. 
But that is Nihilism, and the sign of a despair- 
ing, mortally wearied soul, notwithstanding the 
courageous bearing such a virtue may display. It 
seems, however, to be otherwise with stronger and 
livelier thinkers who are still eager for life. In 
that they side against appearance, and speak super- 
ciliously of "perspective," in that they rank the 
credibility of their own bodies about as low as the 
credibility of the ocular evidence that "the earth 
stands still," and thus, apparently, allowing with 
complacency their securest possession to escape 
(for what does one at present believe in more 
firmly than in one's body ?), — who knows if they are 
not really trying to win back something which 
was formerly an even securer possession, something 
of the old domain of the faith of former times, 
perhaps the "immortal soul," perhaps " the old God," 
in short, ideas by which they could live better, that 
is to say, more vigorously and more joyously, than 
by "modern ideas"? There is distrust of these 
modern ideas in this mode of looking at things, a 
disbelief in all that has been constructed yesterday 
and to-day ; there is perhaps some slight admixture 
of satiety and scorn, which can no longer endure 
the briC'd-brac of ideas of the most varied origin, 
such as so-called Positivism at present throws on 
the market ; a disgust of the more refined taste at 
the village-fair motleyness and patchiness of all 
these reality-philosophasters, in whom there is 
nothing either new or true, except this motleyness. 
Therein it seems to me that we should agree 
with those sceptical anti-realists and knowledge- 



l6 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

microscopists of the present day ; their instinct, 
which repels them from modern reality, is unrefuted 
. . . what do their retrograde by-paths concern 
us ! The main thing about them is not that they 
wish to go " back," but that they wish to get away 
therefrom. A little more strength, swing, courage, 
and artistic power, and they would be ^?^^— and not 
back ! 

II. 

It seems to me that there is everywhere an 
attempt at present to divert attention from the 
actual influence which Kant exercised on German 
philosophy, and especially to ignore prudently the 
value which he set upon himself. Kant was first 
and foremost proud of his Table of Categories ; 
with it in his hand he said : " This is the most 
difficult thing that could ever be undertaken on 
behalf of metaphysics." Let us only understand 
this " could be " ! He was proud of having dis- 
covered d, new faculty in man, the faculty of synthetic 
judgment a priori. Granting that he deceived 
himself in this matter ; the development and rapid 
flourishing of German philosophy depended never- 
theless on his pride, and on the eager rivalry of the 
younger generation to discover if possible something 
— at all events " new faculties " — of which to be still 
prouder ! "—But let us reflect for a moment — it is 
high time to do so. How are synthetic judgments 
a priori possible ? Kant asks himself — and what is 
really his answer ? ^^By means of a means (faculty) " 
— but unfortunately not in five words, but so 
circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. I7 

of German profundity and verbal flourishes, that 
one altogether loses sight of the comical niaiserie 
allemande involved in such an answer. People 
were beside themselves with delight over this new 
faculty, and the jubilation reached its climax when 
Kant further discovered a moral faculty in man — 
for at that time Germans were still moral, not yet 
dabbling in the " Politics of hard fact." Then came 
the honeymoon of German philosophy. All the 
young theologians of the Tubingen institution 
went immediately into the groves — all seeking for 
" faculties." And what did they not find — in that 
innocent, rich, and still youthful period of the 
German spirit, to which Romanticism, the malicious 
fairy, piped and sang, when one could not yet 
distinguish between " finding " and " inventing " ! 
Above all a faculty for the " transcendental " ; 
Schelling christened it, intellectual intuition, and 
thereby gratified the most earnest longings of 
the naturally pious - inclined Germans. One can 
do no greater wrong to the whole of this exuber- 
ant and eccentric movement (which was really 
youthfulness, notwithstanding that it disguised 
itself so boldly in hoary and senile conceptions), 
than to take it seriously, or even treat it with 
moral indignation. Enough, however — the world 
grew older, and the dream vanished. A time 
came when people rubbed their foreheads, and 
they still rub them to-day. People had been 
dreaming, and first and foremost — old Kant. " By 
means of a means (faculty)" — he had said, or at 
least meant to say. But, is that — an answer ? An 
explanation ? Or is it not rather merely a repetition 

B 



1 8 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

of the question? How does opium induce sleep? 
" By means of a means (faculty)," namely the virtus 
dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere, 

Quia est in eo virtus dormitiva^ 
Cujus est natura sensus assoupire. 

But such replies belong to the realm of comedy, 
and it is high time to replace the Kantian question, 
" How are synthetic judgments a priori possible ? " 
by another question, " Why is belief in such judg- 
ments necessary ? " — in effect, it is high time that 
we should understand that such judgments must be 
believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation 
of creatures like ourselves ; though they still might 
naturally be false judgments ! Or, more plainly 
spoken, and roughly and readily — synthetic judg- 
ments a priori should not "be possible" at all; we 
have no right to them ; in our mouths they are 
nothing but false judgments. Only, of course, the 
belief in their truth is necessary, as plausible belief 
and ocular evidence belonging to the perspective 
view of life. And finally, to call to mind the enor- 
mous influence which " German philosophy " — I 
hope you understand its right to inverted commas 
(goosefeet)? — has exercised throughout the whole 
of Europe, there is no doubt that a certain virtus 
dormitiva had a share in it ; thanks to German 
philosophy, it was a delight to the noble idlers, the 
virtuous, the mystics, the artists, the three-fourths 
Christians, and the political obscurantists of all 
nations, to find an antidote to the still overwhelming 
sensualism which overflowed from the last century 
into this, in short — " sensus assoupire^ . . . 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. I9 

12. 

As regards materialistic atomism, it is one of the 
best refuted theories that have been advanced, and 
in Europe there is now perhaps no one in the 
learned world so unscholarly as to attach serious sig- 
nification to it, except for convenient everyday use 
(as an abbreviation of the means of expression) — 
thanks chiefly to the Pole Boscovich : he and the 
Pole Copernicus have hitherto been the greatest and 
most successful opponents of ocular evidence. For 
whilst Copernicus has persuaded us to believe, con- 
trary to all the senses, that the earth does not stand 
fast, Boscovich has taught us to abjure the belief in 
the last thing that " stood fast " of the earth — the 
belief in " substance," in " matter," in the earth- 
residuum, and particle - atom : it is the greatest 
triumph over the senses that has hitherto been 
gained on earth. One must, however, go still 
further, and also declare war, relentless war to the 
knife, against the " atomistic requirements " which 
still lead a dangerous after-life in places where no 
one suspects them, like the more celebrated " meta- 
physical requirements " : one must also above all 
give the finishing stroke to that other and more 
portentous atomism which Christianity has taught 
best and longest, the soul-atomism. Let it be per- 
mitted to designate by this expression the belief 
which regards the soul as something indestructible, 
eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atofnon : this 
belief ought to be expelled from science ! Between 
ourselves, it is not at all necessary to get rid of " the 
soul " thereby, and thus renounce one of the oldest 



20 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

and most venerated hypotheses — as happens fre- 
quently to the clumsiness of naturalists, who can 
hardly touch on the soul without immediately 
losing it. But the way is open for new acceptations 
and refinements of the soul-hypothesis ; and such 
conceptions as " mortal soul," and " soul as subjec- 
tive multiplicity," and " soul as social structure of 
the instincts and passions," want henceforth to have 
legitimate rights in science. In that the new psy- 
chologist is about to put an end to the supersti- 
tions which have hitherto flourished with almost 
tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul, 
he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a 
new desert and a new distrust — it is possible that 
the older psychologists had a merrier and more 
comfortable time of it ; eventually, however, he 
finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned 
to invent — and, who knows ? perhaps to discover \}iMt 
new. 

13. 

Psychologists should bethink themselves before 
putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the 
cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living 
thing seeks above all to discharge its strength — life 
itself is Will to Power ; self-preservation is only 
one of the indirect and most frequent results thereof 
In short, here, as everywhere else, let us beware of 
superfluous teleological principles ! — one of which is 
the instinct of self- preservation (we owe it to 
Spinoza's inconsistency). It is thus, in effect, that 
method ordains, which must be essentially economy 
of principles. 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. 21 

14. 

It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds 
that natural philosophy is only a world-exposition 
and world-arrangement (according to us, if I may 
say so !) and not a world-explanation ; but in so 
far as it is based on belief in the senses, it is regarded 
as more, and for a long time to come must be 
regarded as more — namely, as an explanation. It 
has ^yo,^ and fingers of its own, it has ocular evi- 
dence and palpableness of its own : this oper- 
ates fascinatingly, persuasively, and convincingly 
upon an age with fundamentally plebeian tastes — 
in fact, it follows instinctively the canon of truth 
of eternal popular sensualism. What is clear, 
what is "explained"? Only that which can be 
seen and felt — one must pursue every problem 
thus far. Obversely, however, the charm of the 
Platonic mode of thought, which was an aristo- 
cratic mode, consisted precisely in resistance to 
obvious sense-evidence — perhaps among men who 
enjoyed even stronger and more fastidious senses 
than our contemporaries, but who knew how to 
find a higher triumph in remaining masters of 
them : and this by means of pale, cold, grey con- 
ceptional networks which they threw over the 
motley whirl of the senses — the mob of the senses, 
as Plato said. In this overcoming of the world, and 
interpreting of the world in the manner of Plato, 
there was an enjoyment different from that which 
the physicists of to-day offer us — and likewise the 
Darwinists and antiteleologists among the physio- 
logical workers, with their principle of the " smallest 



22 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

possible effort," and the greatest possible blunder. 
" Where there is nothing more to see or to grasp, 
there is also nothing more for men to do" — that 
is certainly an imperative different from the Platonic 
one, but it may notwithstanding be the right im- 
perative for a hardy, laborious race of machinists 
and bridge-builders of the future, who have nothing 
but rough work to perform. 

15. 

To study physiology with a clear conscience, one 
must insist on the fact that the sense-organs are 
not phenomena in the sense of the idealistic 
philosophy; as such they certainly could not be 
causes ! Sensualism, therefore, at least as regu- 
lative hypothesis, if not as heuristic principle. 
What ? And others say even that the external 
world IS the work of our organs? But then our 
body, as a part of this external world, would be the 
work of our organs ! But then our organs them- 
selves would be the work of our organs ! It seems 
to me that this is a complete reductio ad absurdum^ 
if the conception causa sui is something fundament- 
ally absurd. Consequently, the external world is 
not the work of our organs — ? 

16. 

There are still harmless self-observers who be- 
lieve that there are " immediate certainties " ; for 
instance, " I think," or as the superstition of 
Schopenhauer puts it, " I will " ; as though cognition 
here got hold of its object purely and simply as 
" the thing in itself," without any falsification taking 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. 23 

place either on the part of the subject or the object. 
I would repeat it, however, a hundred times, that 
"immediate certainty," as well as "absolute know- 
ledge " and the " thing in itself," involve a conira- 
dictio in adjecto ; we really ought to free ourselves 
from the misleading significance of words ! The 
people on their part may think that cognition is 
knowing all about things, but the philosopher must 
say to himself : " When I analyse the process that 
is expressed in the sentence, * I think,' I find a 
whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative 
proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impos- 
sible : for instance, that it is / who think, that there 
must necessarily be something that thinks, that 
thinking is an activity and operation on the part of 
a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is 
an " ego," and finally, that it is already determined 
what is to be designated by thinking — that I 
know what thinking is. For if I had not already 
decided within myself what it is, by what standard 
could I determine whether that which is just 
happening is not perhaps * willing ' or * feeling ' ? 
In short, the assertion * I think,' assumes that I 
compare my state at the present moment with other 
states of myself which I know, in order to deter- 
mine what it is ; on account of this retrospective 
connection with further * knowledge,' it has at any 
rate no immediate certainty for me." — In place of 
the "immediate certainty" in which the people 
may believe in the special case, the philosopher thus 
finds a series of metaphysical questions presented 
to him, veritable conscience questions of the in- 
tellect, to wit : " From whence did I get the notion 



24 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

of ^thinking'? Why do I believe in cause and 
effect? What gives me the right to speak of an 
' ego/ and even of an * ego ' as cause, and finally 
of an *ego' as cause of thought?" He who 
ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at 
once by an appeal to a sort of intuitive perception, 
like the person who says, " I think, and know that 
this, at least, is true, actual, and certain" — will 
encounter a smile and two notes of interrogation in 
a philosopher nowadays. " Sir," the philosopher 
will perhaps give him to understand, " it is improb- 
able that you are not mistaken, but why should it 
be the truth ? " 

17. 

With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I 
shall never tire of emphasising a small, terse fact, 
which is unwillingly recognised by these credulous 
minds — namely, that a thought comes when "it" 
wishes, and not when " I " wish ; so that it is a 
perversion of the facts of the case to say that the 
subject " I " is the condition of the predicate 
" think." One thinks ; but that this " one " is pre- 
cisely the famous old " ego," is, to put it mildly, 
only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not 
an " immediate certainty." After all, one has even 
gone too far with this "one thinks" — even the 
" one " contains an interpretation of the process, and 
does not belong to the process itself. One infers 
here according to the usual grammatical formula — 
"To think is an activity; every activity requires 
an agency that is active ; consequently "... It 
was pretty much on the same lines that the older 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. 25 

atomism sought, besides the operating " power/* the 
material particle wherein it resides and out of 
which it operates — the atom. More rigorous minds, 
however, learnt at last to get along without this 
" earth-residuum," and perhaps some day we shall 
accustom ourselves, even from the logician's point 
of view, to get along without the little "one" (to 
which the worthy old " ego " has refined itself). 

18. 

It is certainly not the least charm of a theory 
that it is refutable ; it is precisely thereby that it 
attracts the more subtle minds. It seems that the 
hundred-times-refuted theory of the "free will" 
owes its persistence to this charm alone ; some one 
is always appearing who feels himself strong enough 
to refute it. 

19. 

Philosophers are accustomed to speak of the will 
as though it were the best-known thing in the 
world ; indeed, Schopenhauer has given us to un- 
derstand that the will alone is really known to us, 
absolutely and completely known, without deduction 
or addition. But it again and again seems to me 
that in this case Schopenhauer also only did what 
philosophers are in the habit of doing — he seems to 
have adopted a popular prejudice and exaggerated 
it. Willing — seems to me to be above all something 
complicated^ something that is a unity only in name 
— and it is precisely in a name that popular preju- 
dice lurks, which has got the mastery over the 
inadequate precautions of philosophers in all ages. 



26 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

So let us for once be more cautious, let us be " un- 
philosophical " : let us say that in all willing there 
is firstly a plurality of sensations, namely, the sen- 
sation of the condition ^' away from which we go," 
the sensation of the condition " towards which we 
go," the sensation of this '^from " and " towards " 
itself, and then besides, an accompanying muscu- 
lar sensation, which, even without our putting 
in motion " arms and legs," commences its action 
by force of habit, directly we "will" anything. 
Therefore, just as sensations (and indeed many 
kinds of sensations) are to be recognised as 
ingredients of the will, so, in the second place, 
thinking is also to be recognised ; in every act of 
the will there is a ruling thought ; — and let us 
not imagine it possible to sever this thought from 
the " willing," as if the will would then remain over ! 
In the third place, the will is not only a complex of 
sensation and thinking, but it is above all an emotion^ 
and in fact the emotion of the command. That 
which is termed " freedom of the will " is essentially 
the emotion of supremacy in respect to him who 
must obey : " I am free, ' he ' must obey " — this con- 
sciousness is inherent in every will ; and equally 
so the straining of the attention, the straight look 
which fixes itself exclusively on one thing, the un- 
conditional judgment that " this and nothing else is 
necessary now," the inward certainty that obedience 
will be rendered — and whatever else pertains to the 
position of the commanded A man who wills 
commands something within himself which renders 
obedience, or which he believes renders obedience. 
But now let us notice what is the strangest thing 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. 27 

about the will, — this affair so extremely complex, 
for which the people have only one name. Inas- 
much as in the given circumstances we are at the 
same time the commanding and the obeying parties, 
and as the obeying party we know the sensations 
of constraint, impulsion, pressure, resistance, and 
motion, which usually commence immediately after 
the act of will ; inasmuch as, on the other hand, we 
are accustomed to disregard this duality, and to 
deceive ourselves about it by means of the synthetic 
term " I " : a whole series of erroneous conclusions, 
and consequently of false judgments about the will 
itself, has become attached to the act of willing — to 
such a degree that he who wills believes firmly that 
willing suffices for action. Since in the majority of 
cases there has only been exercise of will when the 
effect of the command — consequently obedience, 
and therefore action — was to be expected, the appear- 
ance has translated itself into the sentiment, as if 
there were there a necessity of effect ; in a word, 
he who wills believes with a fair amount of certainty 
that will and action are somehow one ; he ascribes 
the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will 
itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensa- 
tion of power which accompanies all success. 
" Freedom of Will " — that is the expression for the 
complex state of delight of the person exercising 
volition, who commands and at the same time 
identifies himself with the executor of the order — 
who, as such, enjoys also the triumph over obstacles, 
but thinks within himself that it was really his own 
will that overcame them. In this way the person 
exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of 



28 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

his successful executive instruments, the useful 
" underwills " or under-souls — indeed, our body is 
but a social structure composed of many souls — to 
his feelings of delight as commander. Leffet cest 
mot : what happens here is what happens in every 
well-constructed and happy commonwealth, namely, 
that the governing class identifies itself with the 
successes of the commonwealth. In all willing it is 
absolutely a question of commanding and obeying, 
on the basis, as already said, of a social structure 
composed of many " souls " ; on which account a 
philosopher should claim the right to include 
willing-as-such within the sphere of morals — re- 
garded as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy 
under which the phenomenon of " life " manifests 
itself. 

20, 

That the separate philosophical ideas are not 
anything optional or autonomously evolving, but 
grow up in connection and relationship with each 
other ; that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they 
seem to appear in the history of thought, they 
nevertheless belong just as much to a system as 
the collective members of the fauna of a Continent 
— is betrayed in the end by the circumstance : how 
unfailingly the most diverse philosophers always fill 
in again a definite fundamental scheme of possible 
philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always 
revolve once more in the same orbit ; however 
independent of each other they may feel themselves 
with their critical or systematic wills, something 
within them leads them, something impels them in 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. 29 

definite order the one after the other — to wit, the 
innate methodology and relationship of their ideas. 
Their thinking is in fact far less a discovery than a 
re-recognising, a remembering, a return and a home- 
coming to a far-off, ancient common-household of 
the soul, out of which those ideas formerly grew : 
philosophising is so far a kind of atavism of the 
highest order. The wonderful family resemblance 
of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophising 
is easily enough explained. In fact, where there 
is affinity of language, owing to the common 
philosophy of grammar — I mean owing to the 
unconscious domination and guidance of similar 
grammatical functions — it cannot but be that every- 
thing is prepared at the outset for a similar de- 
velopment and succession of philosophical systems ; 
just as the way seems barred against certain other 
possibilities of world-interpretation. It is highly 
probable that philosophers within the domain of 
the Ural-Altaic languages (where the conception of 
the subject is least developed) look otherwise " into 
the world," and will be found on paths of thought 
different from those of the Indo-Germans and 
Mussulmans ; the spell of certain grammatical 
functions is ultimately also the spell oi physiological 
valuations and racial conditions. — So much by way 
of rejecting Locke's superficiality with regard to 
the origin of ideaSo 

21. 

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that 
has yet been conceived, it is a sort of logical viola- 
tion and unnaturalness ; but the extravagant pride 



30 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly 
and frightfully with this very folly. The desire for 
" freedom of will " in the superlative, metaphysical 
sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the 
minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the 
entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions 
oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, 
chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing 
less than to be precisely this causa sui, and, with 
more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up 
into existence by the hair, out of the slough of 
nothingness. If any one should find out in this 
manner the crass stupidity of the celebrated con- 
ception of " free will " and put it out of his head 
altogether, I beg of him to carry his " enlighten- 
ment " a step further, and also put out of his head 
the contrary of this monstrous conception of " free 
will " : I mean " non-free will," which is tantamount 
to a misuse of cause and effect. One should not 
wrongly materialise "cause" and "effect," as the 
natural philosophers do (and whoever like them 
naturalise in thinking at present), according to the 
prevailing mechanical doltishness which makes the 
cause press and push until it " effects " its end ; one 
should use " cause " and " effect " only as pure con- 
ceptions, that is to say, as conventional fictions for 
the purpose of designation and mutual under- 
standing, — not for explanation. In "being-in- 
itself" there is nothing of "causal-connection," of 
" necessity," or of " psychological non-freedom ; 
there the effect does not follow the cause, there 
" law " does not obtain. It is we alone who have 
devised cause, sequence, reciprocity, relativity, 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. 3 1 

constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and pur- 
pose ; and when we interpret and intermix this 
symbol-world, as " being in itself," with things, we 
act once more as we have always acted — mytho- 
logically. The " non-free will " is mythology ; in 
real life it is only a question of strong and weak 
wills. — It is almost always a symptom of what 
is lacking in himself, when a thinker, in every 
" causal-connection " and " psychological neces- 
sity," manifests something of compulsion, indigence, 
obsequiousness, oppression, and non-freedom ; it is 
suspicious to have such feelings — the person betrays 
himself. And in general, if I have observed 
correctly, the " non-freedom of the will " is regarded 
as a problem from two entirely opposite stand- 
points, but always in a i^xoioMVidXy personal manner: 
some will not give up their " responsibility," their 
belief in themselves^ the personal right to their 
merits, at any price (the vain races belong to this 
class) ; others on the contrary, do not wish to be 
answerable for anything, or blamed for anything, 
and owing to an inward self-contempt, seek to get 
out of the business^ no matter how. The latter, 
when they write books, are in the habit at present 
of taking the side of criminals ; a sort of socialistic 
sympathy is their favourite disguise. And as a 
matter of fact, the fatalism of the weak-willed 
embellishes itself surprisingly when it can pose as 
^^ la religion de la souff ranee huniaine^^ ; that is its 
" good taste." 

22. 

Let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who 
cannot desist from the mischief of putting his 



32 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

finger on bad modesof interpretation, but " Nature^s 
conformity to law/* of which you physicists talk so 
proudly, as though — why, it exists only owing to 
your interpretation and bad " philology," It is no 
matter of fact, no " text," but rather just a naively 
humanitarian adjustment and perversion of mean- 
ing, with which you make abundant concessions 
to the democratic instincts of the modern soul ! 
" Everywhere equality before the law — Nature is 
not different in that respect, nor better than we :" 
a fine instance of secret motive, in which the vulgar 
antagonism to everything privileged and autocratic 
— likewise a second and more refined atheism — is 
once more disguised. " Ni dieUy ni maitre '' — that, 
also, is what you want ; and therefore " Cheers for 
natural law ! " — is it not so ? But, as has been said, 
that IS interpretation, not text ; and somebody 
might come along, who, with opposite intentions 
and modes of interpretation, could read out of the 
same " Nature," and with regard to the same pheno- 
mena, just the tyrannically inconsiderate and relent- 
less enforcement of the claims of power — an inter- 
preter who should so place the unexceptionalness 
and unconditionalness of all " Will to Power" before 
your eyes, that almost every word, and the word 
" tyranny " itself, would eventually seem unsuitable, 
or like a weakening and softening metaphor — as 
being too human ; and who should, nevertheless, 
end by asserting the same about this world as you 
do, namely, that it has a " necessary " and " calcu- 
lable " course, not, however, because laws obtain in 
it, but because they are absolutely lacking, and 
every power effects its ultimate consequences every 



PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS. 33 

moment. Granted that this also is only interpreta- 
tion — and you will be eager enough to make this 
objection ? — well, so much the better. 

23. 

All psychology hitherto has run aground on moral 
prejudices and timidities, it has not dared to launch 
out into the depths. In so far as it is allowable to 
recognise in that which has hitherto been written, 
evidence of that which has hitherto been kept 
silent, it seems as if nobody had yet harboured the 
notion of psychology as the Morphology and 
Development-doctrine of the Will to PoweVy as I 
conceive of it. The power of moral prejudices has 
penetrated deeply into the most intellectual world, 
the world apparently most indifferent and unpre- 
judiced, and has obviously operated in an injurious, 
obstructive, blinding, and distorting manner. A 
proper physio-psychology has to contend with un- 
conscious antagonism in the heart of the investigator, 
it has " the heart " against it : even a doctrine of the 
reciprocal conditionalness of the " good " and the 
" bad " impulses, causes (as refined immorality) 
distress and aversion in a still strong and manly 
conscience — still more so, a doctrine of the deriva- 
tion of all good impulses from bad ones. If, how- 
ever, a person should regard even the emotions of 
hatred, envy, covetousness, and imperiousness as 
life-conditioning emotions, as factors v/hich must 
be present, fundamentally and essentially, in the 
general economy of life (which must, therefore, be 
further developed if life is to be further developed), 
he will suffer from such a view of things as from 

C 



34 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, 

sea-sickness. And yet this hypothesis is far from 
being the strangest and most painful in this immense 
and almost new domain of dangerous knowledge ; 
and there are in fact a hundred good reasons why 
every one should keep away from it who can do so ! 
On the other hand, if one has once drifted hither 
with one's bark, well ! very good ! now let us set 
our teeth firm.ly! let us open our eyes and keep 
our hand fast on the helm ! We sail away right 
over morality, we crush out, we destroy perhaps 
the remains of our own morality by daring to make 
our voyage thither — but what do we matter ! Never 
yet did ^profounder world of insight reveal itself to 
daring travellers and adventurers, and the psycho- 
logist who thus " makes a sacrifice " — it is not the 
sacrifizio dell' intelletto^ on the contrary! — will at 
least be entitled to demand in return that psycho- 
logy shall once more be recognised as the queen of 
the sciences, for whose service and equipment the 
other sciences exist. For psychology is once more 
the path to the fundamental problems. 



SECOND CHAPTER. 
THE FREE SPIRIT. 

24. 

O SANCTA simplicitas ! In what strange simplifica- 
tion and falsification man lives ! One can never 
cease wondering when once one has got eyes for 
beholding this marvel ! How we have made every- 
thing around us clear and free and easy and simple ! 
how we have been able to give our senses a pass- 
port to everything superficial, our thoughts a god- 
like desire for wanton pranks and wrong inferences ! 
— how from the beginning, we have contrived to 
retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost 
inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, 
heartiness, and gaiety — in order to enjoy life ! And 
only on this solidified, granite-like foundation of 
ignorance could knowledge rear itself hitherto, the 
will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more 
powerful will, the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, 
to the untrue ! Not as its opposite, but — as its 
refinement ! It is to be hoped, indeed, that lan- 
guage^ here as elsewhere, will not get over its awk- 
wardness, and that it will continue to talk of 
opposites where there are only degrees and many 
refinements of gradation ; it is equally to be hoped 
that the incarnated Tartuffery of morals, which now 
belongs to our unconquerable " flesh and blood,*' will 



36 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

turn the words round in the mouths of us discerning 
ones. Here and there we understand it, and laugh 
at the way in which precisely the best knowledge 
seeks most to retain us in this simplified^ thoroughly 
artificial, suitably imagined and suitably falsified 
world : at the way in which, whether it will or not, 
it loves error, because, as living itself, it loves life ! 

25. 

After such a cheerful commencement, a serious 
word would fain be heard ; it appeals to the most 
serious minds. Take care, ye philosophers and 
friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom ! 
Of suffering " for the truth's sake"! even in your 
own defence ! It spoils all the innocence and fine 
neutrality of your conscience ; it makes you head- 
strong against objections and red rags ; it stupefies, 
animalises, and brutalises, when in the struggle with 
danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse 
consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your 
last card as protectors of truth upon earth — as 
though "the Truth" were such an innocent and in- 
competent creature as to require protectors ! and 
you of all people, ye knights of the sorrowful 
countenance, Messrs Loafers and Cobweb-spinners 
of the spirit ! Finally, ye know sufficiently well 
that it cannot be of any consequence \{ ye just carry 
your point ; ye know that hitherto no philosopher 
has carried his point, and that there might be a 
more laudable truthfulness in every little interroga- 
tive mark which you place after your special words 
and favourite doctrines (and occasionally after your- 
selves) than in all the solemn pantomime and 



THE FREE SPIRIT. 37 

trumping games before accusers and law-courts ! 
Rather go out of the way ! Flee into concealment ! 
And have your masks and your ruses, that ye may 
be mistaken for what you are, or somewhat feared ! 
And pray, don't forget the garden, the garden with 
golden trellis-work ! And have people around you 
who are as a garden — or as music on the waters at 
eventide, when already the day becomes a memory. 
Choose the good solitude, the free, wanton, light- 
some solitude, which also gives you the right still 
to remain good in any sense whatsoever ! How 
poisonous, how crafty, how bad, does every long war 
make one, which cannot be waged openly by means 
of force ! Yio^ personal di0^s> a long fear make one, 
a long watching of enemies, of possible enemies ! 
These pariahs of society, these long-pursued, badly- 
persecuted ones — also the compulsory recluses, the ^ 
Spinozas or Giordano Brunos — always become in 
the end, even under the most intellectual masquer- 
ade, and perhaps without being themselves aware 
of it, refined vengeance-seekers and poison-brewers 
(just lay bare the foundation of Spinoza's ethics 
and theology !), not to speak of the stupidity of 
moral indignation, which is the unfailing sign in a 
philosopher that the sense of philosophical humour 
has left him. The martyrdom of the philosopher, 
his " sacrifice for the sake of truth," forces into the 
light whatever of the agitator and actor lurks in 
him ; and if one has hitherto contemplated him 
only with artistic curiosity, with regard to many a 
philosopher it is easy to understand the dangerous 
desire to see him also in his deterioration (deterior- 
ated into a "martyr," into a stage- and tribune- 



38 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

bawler). Only, that it is necessary with such a 
desire to be clear what spectacle one will see in any 
case — merely a satyric play, merely an epilogue 
farce, merely the continued proof that the long, real 
tragedy is at an end, supposing that every philosophy 
has been a long tragedy in its origin. 

26. 

Every select man strives instinctively for a 
citadel and a privacy, where he is free from the 
crowd, the many, the majority — where he may 
forget " men who are the rule," as their exception ; 
— exclusive only of the case in which he is pushed 
straight to such men by a still stronger instinct, as 
a discerner in the great and exceptional sense. 
Whoever, in intercourse with men, does not occa- 
sionally glisten in all the green and grey colours 
of distress, owing to disgust, satiety, sympathy, 
gloominess and solitariness, is assuredly not a 
man of elevated tastes ; supposing, however, that 
he does not voluntarily take all this burden and 
disgust upon himself, that he persistently avoids it, 
and remains, as I said, quietly and proudly hidden 
in his citadel, one thing is then certain : he was not 
made, he was not predestined for knowledge. For 
as such, he would one day have to say to himself: 
" The devil take my good taste ! but * the rule ' is 
more interesting than the exception — than myself, 
the exception ! " And he would go downy and 
above all, he would go "inside." The long and 
serious study of the average man — and conse- 
quently much disguise, self-overcoming, familiarity, 
and bad intercourse (all intercourse is bad inter- 



THE FREE SPIRIT. 39 

course except with one's equals) : — that constitutes 
a necessary part of the life-history of every 
philosopher ; perhaps the most disagreeable, 
odious, and disappointing part. If he is fortun- 
ate, however, as a favourite child of knowledge 
should be, he will meet with suitable auxiliaries 
who will shorten and lighten his task ; I mean so- 
called cynics, those who simply recognise the 
animal, the common-place and ''the rule" in them- 
selves, and at the same time have so much spiritu- 
ality and ticklishness as to make them talk of 
themselves and their like before witnesses — some- 
times they wallow, even in books, as on their own 
dung-hill. Cynicism is the only form in which 
base souls approach what is called honesty ; and 
the higher man must open his ears to all the 
coarser or finer cynicism, and congratulate himself 
when the clown becomes shameless right before 
him, or the scientific satyr speaks out. There are 
even cases where enchantment mixes with the 
disgust — namely, where by a freak of nature, genius 
is bound to some such indiscreet billy-goat and 
ape, as in the case of the Abbe Galiani, the pro- 
foundest, acutest, and perhaps also filthiest man of 
his century — he was far profounder than Voltaire, 
and consequently also, a good deal more silent. 
It happens more frequently, as has been hinted, 
that a scientific head is placed on an ape's body, a 
fine exceptional understanding in a base soul, an 
occurrence by no means rare, especially amongst 
doctors and moral physiologists. And whenever 
any one speaks without bitterness, or rather quite 
innocently of man, as a belly with two requirements, 



40 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

and a head with one ; whenever any one sees, seeks 
and wants to see only hunger, sexual instinct, and 
vanity as the real and only motives of human 
actions; in short, when any one speaks "badly" 
— and not even " ill " — of man, then ought the 
lover of knowledge to hearken attentively and 
diligently ; he ought, in general, to have an open 
ear wherever there is talk without indignation. 
For the indignant man, and he who perpetually 
tears and lacerates himself with his own teeth (or, 
in place of himself, the world, God, or society), may 
indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the 
laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other 
sense he is the more ordinary, more indifferent, and 
less instructive case. And no one is such a liar as 
the indignant man. 

27. 
It is difficult to be understood, especially when one 
thinks and lives gangasrotogati^ among those only 
who think and live otherwise — namely, kurmagatif^ 
or at best " froglike," mandeikagati% (I do everything 
to be "difficultly understood" myself!) — and one 
should be heartily grateful for the good will to some 
refinement of interpretation. As regards "the good 
friends," however, who are always too easy-going, 
and think that as friends they have a right to ease, 
one does well at the very first to grant them a 'play- 
ground and romping-place for misunderstanding — 
one can thus laugh still ; or get rid of them alto- 
gether, these good friends — and laugh then also ! 

* Like the river Ganges : presto, 

t Like the tortoise : lento, % Like the frog : staccato. 



THE FREE SPIRIT. 4I 



28. 



What IS most difficult to render from one language 
into another is the tempo of its style, which has its 
basis in the character of the race, or to speak more 
physiologically, in the average tempo of the 
assimilation of its nutriment. There are honestly 
meant translations, which, as involuntary vulgarisa- 
tions, are almost falsifications of the original, 
merely because its lively and merry tempo (which 
overleaps and obviates all dangers in word and 
expression) could not also be rendered. A German 
is almost incapacitated for presto in his language ; 
consequently also, as may be reasonably inferred, 
for many of the most delightful and daring nuances 
of free, free-spirited thought. And just as the 
buffoon and satyr are foreign to him in body and 
conscience, so Aristophanes and Petronius are 
untranslatable for him. Everything ponderous, 
viscous, and pompously clumsy, all long-winded 
and wearying species of style, are developed in 
profuse variety among Germans — pardon me for 
stating the fact that even Goethe's prose, in its 
mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, 
as a reflection of the " good old time " to which it 
belongs, and as an expression of German taste at a 
time when there was still a " German taste," which 
was a rococo-taste in moribus et artibus, Lessing 
is an exception, owing to his histrionic nature, which 
understood much, and was versed in many things ; 
he who was not the translator of Bayle to no 
purpose, who took refuge willingly in the shadow 
of Diderot and Voltaire, and still more willingly 



42 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

among the Roman comedy-writers — Lessing loved 
also free-spiritism in the tempo, the flight out of 
Germany. But how could the German language, 
even in the prose of Lessing, imitate the tempo of 
Machiavelli, who in his "Principe" makes us breathe 
the dry, fine air of Florence, and cannot help pre- 
senting the most serious events in a boisterous 
allegrissimOy perhaps not without a malicious artistic 
sense of the contrast he ventures to present — long, 
heavy, difficult, dangerous thoughts, and a tempo of 
the gallop, and of the best, wantonest humour? 
Finally, who would venture on a German translation 
of Petronius, who, more than any great musician 
hitherto, was a master oi presto in invention, ideas, 
and words? What matter in the end about the 
swamps of the sick, evil world, or of the " ancient 
world," when like him, one has the feet of a wind, 
the rush, the breath, the emancipating scorn of a 
wind, which makes everything healthy, by making 
everything run ! And with regard to Aristophanes 
— that transfiguring, complementary genius, for 
whose sake on^ pardons all Hellenism for having 
existed, provided one has understood in its full 
profundity all that there requires pardon and trans- 
figuration ; there is nothing that has caused me to 
meditate more on Plato's secrecy and sphinx-like 
nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that 
under the pillow of his death-bed there was found 
no " Bible," nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, 
or Platonic — but a book of Aristophanes. How 
could even a Plato have endured life — a Greek life 
which he repudiated — without an Aristophanes ! 



THE FREE SPIRIT. 43 

29. 

It is the business of the very few to be inde- 
pendent ; it is a privilege of the strong. And who- 
ever attempts it, even with the best right, but 
without being obliged to do so, proves that he is 
probably not only strong, but also daring beyond 
measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies 
a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself 
already brings with it ; not the least of which is 
that no one can see how and where he loses his 
way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by 
some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a 
one comes to grief, it is so far from the compre- 
hension of men that they neither feel it, nor 
sympathise with it. And he cannot any longer go 
back ! He cannot even go back again to the 
sympathy of men ! 

30. 

Our deepest insights must — and should — appear 
as follies, and under certain circumstances as crimes, 
when they come unauthorisedly to the ears of those 
who are not disposed and predestined for them. 
The exoteric and the esoteric, as they were formerly 
distinguished by philosophers — among the Indians, 
as among the Greeks, Persians, and Mussulmans, 
in short, wherever people believed in gradations of 
rank and not in equality and equal rights — are not 
so much in contradistinction to one another in 
respect to the exoteric class, standing without, and 
viewing, estimating, measuring, and judging from 
the outside, and not from the inside ; the more 



44 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

essential distinction is that the class in question 
views things from below upwards — while the 
esoteric class views things from above downwards. 
There are heights of the soul from which tragedy 
itself no longer appears to operate tragically ; and 
if all the woe in the world were taken together, who 
would dare to decide whether the sight of it would 
necessarily seduce and constrain to sympathy, and 
thus to a doubling of the woe ? . . . That which 
serves the higher class of men for nourishment or 
refreshment, must be almost poison to an entirely 
different and lower order of human beings. The 
virtues of the common man would perhaps mean 
vice and weaknesses in a philosopher ; it might be 
possible for a highly developed man, supposing him 
to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities 
thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have 
to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into 
which he had sunk. There are books which have 
an inverse value for the soul and the health accord- 
ing as the inferior soul and the lower vitality, or the 
higher and more powerful, make use of them. In 
the former case they are dangerous, disturbing, un- 
settling books, in the latter case they are herald- 
calls which summon the bravest to their bravery. 
Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling 
books, the odour of paltry people clings to them. 
Where the populace eat and drink, and even 
where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink. 
One should not go into churches if one wishes 
to hredithe pure air. 



THE FREE SPIRIT, 45 

In our youthful years we still venerate and 
despise without the art of nuance, which is the best 
gain of life, and we have rightly to do hard penance 
for having fallen upon men and things with Yea and 
Nay. Everything is so arranged that the worst of 
all tastes, the taste for the unconditional^ is cruelly 
befooled and abused, until a man learns to introduce 
a little art into his sentiments, and prefers to try 
conclusions with the artificial, as do the real artists 
of life. The angry and reverent spirit peculiar to 
youth appears to allow itself no peace, until it has 
suitably falsified men and things, to be able to vent 
its passion upon them : youth in itself even, is some- 
thing falsifying and deceptive. Later on, when the 
young soul, tortured by continual disillusions, finally 
turns suspiciously against itself — still ardent and 
savage even in its suspicion and remorse of con- 
science : how it upbraids itself, how impatiently it 
tears itself, how it revenges itself for its long self- 
blinding, as though it had been a voluntary blind- 
ness ! In this transition one punishes oneself by 
distrust of one's sentiments ; one tortures one's 
enthusiasm with doubt, one feels even the good 
conscience to be a danger, as if it were the self- 
concealment and lassitude of a more refined up- 
rightness ; and above all, one espouses upon prin- 
ciple the cause against *^ youth." — A decade later, 
and one comprehends that all this also was still — 
youth ! 



46 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

Throughout the longest period of human history 
— one calls it the prehistoric period — the value or 
non-value of an action was inferred from its con- 
sequences ; the action in itself was not taken into 
consideration, any more than its origin ; but pretty 
much as in China at present, where the distinction 
or disgrace of a child redounds to its parents, the 
retro-operating power of success or failure was what 
induced men to think well or ill of an action. Let 
us call this period the /r^-M(?r<3:/ period of mankind ; 
the imperative, " know thyself!" was then still un- 
known. — In the last ten thousand years, on the 
other hand, on certain large portions of the earth, 
one has gradually got so far, that one no longer lets 
the consequences of an action, but its origin, decide 
with regard to its worth : a great achievement as a 
whole, an important refinement of vision and of 
criterion, the unconscious effect of the supremacy 
of aristocratic values and of the belief in " origin," 
the mark of a period which may be designated in 
the narrower sense as the moral one: the first 
attempt at self-knowledge is thereby made. In- 
stead of the consequences, the origin — what an 
inversion of perspective! And assuredly an in- 
version effected only after long struggle and 
wavering ! To be sure, an ominous new superstition, 
a peculiar narrowness of interpretation, attained 
supremacy precisely thereby : the origin of an action 
was interpreted in the most definite sense possible, 
as origin out of an intention ; people were agreed 
in the belief that the value of an action lay in the 



THE FREE SPIRIT. 47 

value of its intention. The intention as the sole 
origin and antecedent history of an action : under 
the influence of this prejudice moral praise and 
blame have been bestowed, and men have judged 
and even philosophised almost up to the present 
day. — Is it not possible, however, that the necessity 
may now have arisen of again making up our minds 
with regard to the reversing and fundamental shift- 
ing of values, owing to a new self-consciousness and 
acuteness in man — is it not possible that we may 
be standing on the threshold of a period which to 
begin with, would be distinguished negatively as 
ultra-moral : nowadays when, at least amongst us 
immoralists, the suspicion arises that the decisive 
value of an action lies precisely in that which is not 
intentional, and that all its intentionalness, all that 
is seen, sensible, or " sensed " in it, belongs to its 
surface or skin — which, like every skin, betrays 
something, but conceals still more ? In short, we 
believe that the intention is only a sign or symptom, 
which first requires an explanation— a sign, more- 
over, which has too many interpretations, and 
consequently hardly any meaning in itself alone : 
that morality, in the sense in which it has been 
understood hitherto, as intention-morality, has been 
a prejudice, perhaps a prematureness or preliminari- 
ness, probably something of the same rank as astro- 
logy and alchemy, but in any case something which 
must be surmounted. The surmounting of morality, 
in a certain sense even the self-surmounting of 
morality — let that be the name for the long secret 
labour which has been reserved for the most re- 
fined, the most upright, and also the most wicked 



48 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

consciences of to-day, as the living touchstones of 
the soul. 

33. 

It cannot be helped : the sentiment of surrender, 
of sacrifice for one's neighbour, and all self-renun- 
ciation-morality, must be mercilessly called to 
account, and brought to judgment ; just as the 
aesthetics of "disinterested contemplation," under 
which the emasculation of art nowadays seeks in- 
sidiously enough to create itself a good conscience. 
There is far too much witchery and sugar in the 
sentiments " for others " and " not for myself," for 
one not needing to be doubly distrustful here, and 
for one asking promptly : " Are they not perhaps — 
deceptions?'^ — That they please — him who has them, 
and him who enjoys their fruit, and also the mere 
spectator — that is still no argument in ^€\x favour ^ 
but just calls for caution. Let us therefore be 
cautious ! 

34. 

At whatever standpoint of philosophy one may 
place oneself nowadays, seen from every position, 
the erroneousness of the world in which we think 
we live is the surest and most certain thing our 
eyes can light upon: we find proof after proof 
thereof, which would fain allure us into surmises 
concerning a deceptive principle in the " nature of 
things." He, however, who makes thinking itself, 
and consequently "the spirit," responsible for the 
falseness of the world — an honourable exit, which 
every conscious or unconscious advocatus dei avails 
himself of — he who regards this world, including 



THE FREE SPIRIT. 49 

space, time, form, and movement, as falsely deduced^ 
would have at least good reason in the end to 
become distrustful also of all thinking ; has it not 
hitherto been playing upon us the worst of scurvy 
tricks? and what guarantee would it give that it 
would not continue to do what it has always been 
doing ? In all seriousness, the innocence of thinkers 
has something touching and respect-inspiring in it, 
which even nowadays permits them to wait upon 
consciousness with the request that it will give them 
honest answers : for example, whether it be " real " 
or not, and why it keeps the outer world so reso- 
lutely at a distance, and other questions of the 
same description. The belief in "immediate cer- 
tainties " is a moral naivete which does honour to 
us philosophers ; but — we have now to cease being 
" merely moral " men ! Apart from morality, such 
belief is a folly which does little honour to us ! If 
in middle-class life an ever-ready distrust is re- 
garded as the sign of a "bad character," and 
consequently as an imprudence, here amongst us, 
beyond the middle-class world and its Yeas and 
Nays, what should prevent us being imprudent and 
saying : the philosopher has at length a right to 
"bad character," as the being who has hitherto 
been most befooled on earth — he is now under 
obligation to distrustfulness, to the wickedest squint- 
ing out of every abyss of suspicion. — Forgive me 
the joke of this gloomy grimace and turn of ex- 
pression ; for I myself have long ago learned to 
think and estimate differently with regard to de- 
ceiving and being deceived, and I keep at least a 
couple of pokes in the ribs ready for the blind rage 

D 



50 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

with which philosophers struggle against being 
deceived. Why not ? It is nothing more than a 
moral prejudice that truth is worth more than 
semblance ; it is, in fact, the worst proved supposi- 
tion in the world. So much must be conceded : 
there could have been no life at all except upon the 
basis of perspective estimates and semblances ; and 
if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and stupidity of 
many philosophers, one wished to do away alto- 
gether with the "seeming world" — well, granted that 
you could do that, — at least nothing of your " truth " 
would thereby remain ! Indeed, what is it that 
forces us in general to the supposition that there is 
an essential opposition of " true " and " false " ? Is 
it not enough to suppose degrees of seemingness, 
and as it were Hghter and darker shades and 
tones of semblance — different valeurs, as the 
painters say? Why might not the world which 
concerns us — be a fiction? And to any one who sug- 
gested : " But to a fiction belongs an originator ? " 
— might it not be bluntly replied : Why ? May not 
this " belong " also belong to the fiction ? Is it not 
at length permitted to be a little ironical towards 
the subject, just as towards the predicate and 
object ? Might not the philosopher elevate himself 
above faith in grammar ? All respect to governesses, 
but is it not time that philosophy should renounce 
governess-faith ? 

35. 
O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There 
is something ticklish in "the truth," and in the 
search for the truth ; and if man goes about it too 



THE FREE SPIRIT. $1 

humanely — " // ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le 
Men " — I wager he finds nothing ! 

36. 

Supposing that nothing else is " given " as real 
but our world of desires and passions, that we can- 
not sink or rise to any other "reality" but just that 
of our impulses — for thinking is only a relation of 
these impulses to one another: — are we not per- 
mitted to make the attempt and to ask the question 
whether this which is " given " does not suffice, by 
means of our counterparts, for the understanding 
even of the so-called mechanical (or " material ") 
world? I do not mean as an illusion, a "sem- 
blance," a " representation " (in the Berkeleyan and 
Schopenhauerian sense), but as possessing the same 
degree of reality as our emotions themselves — as a 
more primitive form of the world of emotions, in 
which everything still lies locked in a mighty unity, 
which afterwards branches off and develops itself 
in organic processes (naturally also, refines and de- 
bilitates) — as a kind of instinctive life in which all 
organic functions, including self-regulation, assimi- 
lation, nutrition, secretion, and change of matter, 
are still synthetically united with one another — as 
a primary form of life? — In the end, it is not only 
permitted to make this attempt, it is commanded 
by the conscience of logical method. Not to assume 
several kinds of causality, so long as the attempt to 
get along with a single one has not been pushed to 
its furthest extent (to absurdity, if I may be allowed 
to say so) : that is a morality of method which one 
may not repudiate nowadays — it follows " from its 



52 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

definition," as mathematicians say. The question 
is ultimately whether we really recognise the will 
as operating, whether we believe in the causality of 
the will ; if we do so — and fundamentally our belief 
in this is just our belief in causality itself — we must 
make the attempt to posit hypothetically the caus- 
ality of the will as the only causality. " Will " can 
naturally only operate on "will" — and not on 
" matter " (not on " nerves," for instance) : in short, 
the hypothesis must be hazarded, whether will does 
not operate on will wherever " effects " are recog- 
nised — and whether all mechanical action, inasmuch 
as a power operates therein, is not just the power 
of will, the effect of will. Granted, finally, that we 
succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as 
the development and ramification of one funda- 
mental form of will — namely, the Will to Power, Sis 
my thesis puts it ; granted that all organic functions 
could be traced back to this Will to Power, and 
that the solution of the problem of generation and 
nutrition — it is one problem — could also be found 
therein : one would thus have acquired the right to 
define all active force unequivocally as Will to 
Power. The world seen from within, the world 
defined and designated according to its " intelligible 
character " — it would simply be " Will to Power," 
and nothing else. 

37. 
"What? Does not that mean in popular lan- 
guage : God is disproved, but not the devil ? " — On 
the contrary ! On the contrary, my friends ! And 
who the devil also compels you to speak popularly ! 



THE FREE SPIRIT. ' 53 

38. 

As happened finally in all the enlightenment of 
modern times with the French Revolution (that 
terrible farce, quite superfluous when judged close 
at hand, into which, however, the noble and vision- 
ary spectators of all Europe have interpreted 
from a distance their own indignation and enthu- 
siasm so long and passionately, until the text has 
disappeared under the interpretatio7i\ so a noble 
posterity might once more misunderstand the whole 
of the past, and perhaps only thereby make its 
aspect endurable. — Or rather, has not this already 
happened? Have not we ourselves been — that 
"noble posterity"? And, in so far as we now 
comprehend this, is it not — thereby already past ? 

39. 

Nobody will very readily regard a doctrine 
as true merely because it makes people happy 
or virtuous — excepting perhaps the amiable 
*' Idealists," who are enthusiastic about the good, 
true, and beautiful, and let all kinds of motley, 
coarse, and good-natured desirabilities sw^im about 
promiscuously in their pond. Happiness and 
virtue are no arguments. It is willingly forgotten, 
however, even on the part of thoughtful minds, 
that to make unhappy and to make bad are just 
as little counter-arguments. A thing could be triie^ 
although it were in the highest degree injurious 
and dangerous ; indeed, the fundamental constitu- 
tion of existence might be such that one succumbed 
by a full knowledge of it — so that the strength of 



54 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

a mind might be measured by the amount of 
" truth " it could endure — or to speak more plainly, 
by the extent to which it required truth attenuated, 
veiled, sweetened, damped, and falsified. But there 
is no doubt that for the discovery of certain portions 
of truth the wicked and unfortunate are more 
favourably situated and have a greater likelihood 
of success ; not to speak of the wicked who are 
happy — a species about whom moralists are silent. 
Perhaps severity and craft are more favourable 
conditions for the development of strong, inde- 
pendent spirits and philosophers than the gentle, 
refined, yielding good-nature, and habit of taking 
things easily, which are prized, and rightly prized 
in a learned man. Presupposing always, to begin 
with, that the term "philosopher" be not confined 
to the philosopher who writes books, or even 
introduces his philosophy into books ! — Stendhal 
furnishes a last feature of the portrait of the free- 
spirited philosopher, which for the sake of German 
taste I will not omit to underline — for it is opposed 
to German taste. " Pour etre bon pkilosopke,^ says 
this last great psychologist, " // faut etre seCy clair, 
sans illusion, Un banquier^ qui a fait for tune ^ a une 
partie du caractere requis pour faire des decouvertes 
en philosophies dest-a-dire pour voir clair dans ce 
qui estr 

40. 

Everything that is profound loves the mask ; the 
profoundest things have a hatred even of image 
and likeness. Should not the contrary only be the 
right disguise for the shame of a God to go about 



THE FREE SPIRIT. 55 

in ? A question worth asking ! — it would be strange 
if some mystic has not already ventured on the 
same kind of thing. There are proceedings of such 
a delicate nature that it is well to overwhelm them 
with coarseness and make them unrecognisable ; 
there are actions of love and of an extravagant 
magnanimity after which nothing can be wiser than 
to take a stick and thrash the witness soundly : 
one thereby obscures his recollection. Many a 
one is able to obscure and abuse his own memory, 
in order at least to have vengeance on this sole 
party in the secret : shame is inventive. They are 
not the worst things of which one is most ashamed : 
there is not only deceit behind a mask — there is so 
much goodness in craft. I could imagine that a 
man with something costly and fragile to conceal, 
would roll through life clumsily and rotundly like 
an old, green, heavily-hooped wine-cask : the refine- 
ment of his shame requiring it to be so. A man 
who has depths in his shame meets his destiny 
and his delicate decisions upon paths which few 
ever reach, and with regard to the existence of 
which his nearest and most intimate friends may 
be ignorant ; his mortal danger conceals itself from 
their eyes, and equally so his regained security. 
Such a hidden nature, which instinctively employs 
speech for silence and concealment, and is in- 
exhaustible in evasion of communication, desires 
and insists that a mask of himself shall occupy his 
place in the hearts and heads of his friends ; and 
supposing he does not desire it, his eyes will some 
day be opened to the fact that there is nevertheless 
a mask of him there — and that it is well to be so. 



56 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

Every profound spirit needs a mask ; nay, more, 
around every profound spirit there continually 
grows a mask, owing to the constantly false, that 
is to say, superficial interpretation of every word he 
utters, every step he takes, every sign of life he 
manifests. 

41. 

One must subject oneself to one's own tests that 
one is destined for independence and command, and 
do so at the right time. One must not avoid one's 
tests, although they constitute perhaps the most 
dangerous game one can play, and are in the end 
tests made only before ourselves and before no 
other judge. Not to cleave to any person, be it 
even the dearest — every person is a prison and also 
a recess. Not to cleave to a fatherland, be it even 
the most suffering and necessitous — it is even less 
difficult to detach one's heart from a victorious 
fatherland. Not to cleave to a sympathy, be it 
even for higher men, into whose peculiar torture 
and helplessness chance has given us an insight. 
Not to cleave to a science, though it tempt one 
with the most valuable discoveries, apparently 
specially reserved for us. Not to cleave to one's 
own liberation, to the voluptuous distance and 
remoteness of the bird, which always flies further 
aloft in order always to see more under it — the 
danger of the flier. Not to cleave to our own 
virtues, nor become as a whole a victim to any of 
our specialities, to our "hospitality" for instance, 
which is the danger of dangers for highly developed 
and wealthy souls, who deal prodigally, almost 



THE FREE SPIRIT. 57 

indifferently with themselves, and push the virtue 
of liberality so far that it becomes a vice. One 
must know how to conserve oneself- — the best test of 
independence. 

42. 

A new order of philosophers is appearing ; I 
shall venture to baptize them by a name not 
without danger. As far as I understand them, as 
far as they allow themselves to be understood — for 
it is their nature to wish to remain something of a 
puzzle — these philosophers of the future might 
rightly, perhaps also wrongly, claim to be desig- 
nated as " tempters^ This name itself is after all 
only an attempt, or, if it be preferred, a temptation. 

43. 

Will they be new friends of " truth,'' these coming 
philosophers ? Very probably, for all philosophers 
hitherto have loved their truths. But assuredly 
they will not be dogmatists. It must be contrary 
to their pride, and also contrary to their taste, that 
their truth should still be truth for every one — 
that which has hitherto been the secret wish and 
ultimate purpose of all dogmatic efforts. " My 
opinion is my opinion : another person has not 
easily a right to it" — such a philosopher of the 
future will say, perhaps. One must renounce the 
bad taste of wishing to agree with many people. 
" Good " is no longer good when one's neighbour 
takes it into his mouth. And how could there be 
a "common good"! The expression contradicts 
itself; that which can be common is always of 



58 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

small value. In the end things must be as they 
are and have always been — the great things remain 
for the great, the abysses for the profound, the 
delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum 
up shortly, everything rare for the rare. 

44. 

Need I say expressly after all this that they will 
be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the 
future — as certainly also they will not be merely 
free spirits, but something more, higher, greater, and 
fundamentally different, which does not wish to be 
misunderstood and mistaken ? But while I say 
this, I feel under obligation almost as much to them 
as to ourselves (we free spirits who are their heralds 
and forerunners), to sweep away from ourselves con- 
jointly a stupid old prejudice and misunderstanding, 
which, like a fog, has too long made the concep- 
tion of "free spirit'' obscure. In every country of 
Europe, and the same in America, there is at 
present something which makes an abuse of this 
name : a very narrow, prepossessed, enchained class 
of spirits, who desire almost the opposite of what 
our intentions and instincts prompt — not to mention 
that in respect to the new philosophers who are 
appearing, they must still more be closed windows 
and bolted doors. Briefly and regrettably, they 
belong to the levellers, these wrongly named " free 
spirits " — as glib - tongued and scribe - fingered 
slaves of the democratic taste and its " modern 
ideas " : all of them men without solitude, without 
personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom 
neither courage nor honourable conduct ought to 



THE FREE SPIRIT. 59 

be denied ; only, they are not free, and are ludi- 
crously superficial, especially in their innate parti- 
ality for seeing the cause of almost all human 
misery and failure in the old forms in which society 
has hitherto existed — a notion which happily in- 
verts the truth entirely ! What they would fain 
attain with all their strength, is the universal, 
green-meadow happiness of the herd, together with 
security, safety, comfort, and alleviation of life for 
every one ; their two most frequently chanted songs 
and doctrines are called ^^ Equality of Rights " and 
" Sympathy with all Sufferers " — and suffering itself 
is looked upon by them as something which must 
be done away with. We opposite ones, however, 
who have opened our eye and conscience to the 
question how and where the plant "man" has 
hitherto grown most vigorously, believe that this 
has always taken place under the opposite condi- 
tions, that for this end the dangerousness of his 
situation had to be increased enormously, his inven- 
tive faculty and dissembling power (his "spirit") 
had to develop into subtlety and daring under long 
oppression and compulsion, and his Will to Life 
had to be increased to the unconditioned Will to 
Power : — we believe that severity, violence, slavery, 
danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoic- 
ism, tempter's art and develry of every kind, — 
that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, preda- 
tory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the 
elevation of the human species as its opposite : — 
we do not even say enough when we only say this 
much ; and in any case we find ourselves here, both 
with our speech and our silence, at the other ^y^- 



6o BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

treme of all modern ideology and gregarious desira- 
bility, as their antipodes perhaps ? What wonder 
that we "free spirits" are not exactly the most 
communicative spirits? that we do not wish to 
betray in every respect what a spirit can free itself 
from, and where perhaps it will then be driven ? And 
as to the import of the dangerous formula, "Beyond 
Good and Evil," with which we at least avoid con- 
fusion, we are something else than ^Hibres-penseursl' 
^^ liberi pensatori" "free-thinkers," and whatever 
these honest advocates of " modern ideas " like to 
call themselves. Having been at home, or at least 
guests, in many realms of the spirit; having escaped 
again and again from the gloomy, agreeable nooks 
in which preferences and prejudices, youth, origin, 
the accident of men and books, or even the weari- 
ness of travel seemed to confine us ; full of malice 
against the seductions of dependency which lie 
concealed in honours, money, positions, or exalta- 
tion of the senses ; grateful even for distress and 
the vicissitudes of illness, because they always free 
us from some rule, and its " prejudice," grateful to 
the God, devil, sheep, and worm in us ; inquisitive 
to a fault, investigators to the point of cruelty, with 
unhesitating fingers for the intangible, with teeth 
and stomachs for the most indigestible, ready for 
any business that requires sagacity and acute 
senses, ready for every adventure, owing to an 
excess of " free will " ; with anterior and posterior 
souls, into the ultimate intentions of which it is 
difficult to pry, with foregrounds and backgrounds 
to the end of which no foot may run ; hidden 
ones under the mantles of light, appropriators, 



THE FREE SPIRIT. 6l 

although we resemble heirs and spendthrifts, ar- 
rangers and collectors from morning till night, 
misers of our wealth and our full-crammed drawers, 
economical in learning and forgetting, inventive in 
scheming ; sometimes proud of tables of categories, 
sometimes pedants, sometimes night-owls of work 
even in full day ; yea, if necessary, even scarecrows 
— and it is necessary nowadays, that is to say, inas- 
much as we are the born, sworn, jealous friends of 
solitude^ of our own profoundest midnight and mid- 
day solitude : — such kind of men are we, we free 
spirits ! And perhaps j^^ are also something of the 
same kind, ye coming ones ? ye new philosophers ? 



THIRD CHAPTER. 
THE RELIGIOUS MOOD. 

45. 

The human soul and its limits, the range of man's 
inner experiences hitherto' attained, the heights, 
depths and distances of these experiences, the 
entire history of the soul up to the present time^ and 
its still unexhausted possibilities : this is the pre- 
ordained hunting-domain for a born psychologist 
and lover of a " big hunt." But how often must he 
say despairingly to himself : " A single individual ! 
alas, only a single individual ! and this great forest, 
this virgin forest !" So he would like to have some 
hundreds of hunting assistants, and fine trained 
hounds, which he could send into the history of the 
human soul, to drive his game together. In vain : 
again and again he experiences, profoundly and 
bitterly, how difficult it is to find assistants and dogs 
for all the things that directly excite his curiosity. 
The evil of sending scholars into new and dangerous 
hunting-domains, where courage, sagacity, and sub- 
tlety in every sense are required, is that they are no 
longer serviceable just when the " big hunt," and 
also the great danger commences, — it is precisely 
then that they lose their keen eye and nose. In 
order, for instance, to divine and determine what 



64 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

sort of history the problem of knowledge and con- 
science has hitherto had in the souls of homines 
religiosiy a person would perhaps himself have to 
possess as profound, as bruised, as immense an ex- 
perience as the intellectual conscience of Pascal ; 
and then he would still require that wide-spread 
heaven of clear, wicked spirituality, which, from 
above, would be able to oversee, arrange, and 
effectively formulise this mass of dangerous and 
painful experiences. — But who could do me this 
service ! And who would have time to wait for 
such servants ! — they evidently appear too rarely, 
they are so improbable at all times! Eventually 
one must do everything oneself in order to know 
something ; which means that one has much to do ! 
— But a curiosity like mine is once for all the most 
agreeable of vices — pardon me ! I mean to say 
that the love of truth has its reward in heaven, and 
already upon earth. 

46. 

Faith, such as early Christianity desired, and not 
infrequently achieved in the midst of a sceptical 
and southernly free-spirited world, which had cen- 
turies of struggle between philosophical schools 
behind it and in it, counting besides the education 
in tolerance which the imperium Romanmn gave — 
this faith is not that sincere, austere slave-faith by 
which perhaps a Luther or a Cromwell, or some 
other northern barbarian of the spirit remained 
attached to his God and Christianity ; it is much 
rather the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a 
terrible manner a continuous suicide of reason — a 



THE RELIGIOUS MOOD. 6$ 

tough, long-lived, wormlike reason, which is not 
to be slain at once and with a single blow. The 
Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice : the 
sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence 
of spirit ; it is at the same time subjection, self- 
derision, and self-mutilation. There is cruelty and 
religious Phoenicianism in this faith, which is 
adapted to a tender, many-sided, and very fastidious 
conscience ; it takes for granted that the subjection 
of the spirit is indescribably painful, that all the 
past and all the habits of such a spirit resist the 
absMrdissimunty in the form of which " faith " comes 
to it. Modern men, with their obtuseness as regards 
all Christian nomenclature, have no longer the sense 
for the terribly superlative conception which was 
implied to an antique taste by the paradox of the 
formula, " God on the Cross." Hitherto there had 
never and nowhere been such boldness in inversion, 
nor anything at once so dreadful, questioning, and 
questionable as this formula : it promised a trans- 
valuation of all ancient values. — It was the Orient, 
the profound Orient, it was the Oriental slave who 
thus took revenge on Rome and its noble, light- 
minded toleration, on the Roman " Catholicism '' of 
non-faith ; and it was always, not the faith, but the 
freedom from the faith, the half-stoical and smiling 
indifference to the seriousness of the faith, which 
made the slaves indignant at their masters and re- 
volt against them. " Enlightenment " causes revolt : 
for the slave desires the unconditioned, he under- 
stands nothing but the tyrannous, even in morals ; 
he loves as he hates, without nuance, to the very 
depths, to the point of pain, to the point of sickness 

E 



66 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

— his many hidden sufferings make him revolt 
against the noble taste which seems to deny suffer- 
ing. The scepticism with regard to suffering, 
fundamentally only an attitude of aristocratic 
morality, was not the least of the causes, also, of the 
last great slave-insurrection which began with the 
French Revolution. 

47. 

Wherever the religious neurosis has appeared 
on the earth so far, we find it connected with three 
dangerous prescriptions as to regimen : solitude, 
fasting, and sexual abstinence — but without it being 
possible to determine with certainty which is cause 
and which is effect, or if any relation at all of cause 
and effect exists there. This latter doubt is justified 
by the fact that one of the most regular symptoms 
among savage as well as among civilised peoples 
is the most sudden and excessive sensuality ; which 
then with equal suddenness transforms into peni- 
tential paroxysms, world-renunciation, and will- 
renunciation : both symptoms perhaps explainable 
as disguised epilepsy? But nowhere is it more 
obligatory to put aside explanations : around no 
other type has there grown such a mass of absur- 
dity and superstition, no other type seems to have 
been more interesting to men and even to philo- 
sophers — perhaps it is time to become just a little 
indifferent here, to learn caution, or, better still, to 
look away, to go away. — Yet in the background of 
the most recent philosophy, that of Schopenhauer, 
we find almost as the problem in itself, this terrible 
note of interrogation of the religious crisis and 



THE RELIGIOUS MOOD. 67 

awakening. How is the negation of will possible ? 
how is the saint possible ? — that seems to have been 
the very question with which Schopenhauer made a 
start and became a philosopher. And thus it was 
a genuine Schopenhauerian consequence, that his 
most convinced adherent (perhaps also his last, as 
far as Germany is concerned), namely, Richard 
Wagner, should bring his own life-work to an end 
just here, and should finally put that terrible and 
eternal type upon the stage as Kundry, type vecu^ 
and as it loved and lived, at the very time that the 
mad-doctors in almost all European countries had 
an opportunity to study the type close at hand, 
wherever the religious neurosis — or as I call it, " the 
religious mood " — made its latest epidemical out- 
break and display as the " Salvation Army." — If it 
be a question, however, as to what has been so 
extremely interesting to men of all sorts in all ages, 
and even to philosophers, in the whole phenomenon 
of the saint, it is undoubtedly the appearance of 
the miraculous therein — namely, the immediate 
succession of opposites^ of states of the soul regarded 
as morally antithetical : it was believed here to be 
self-evident that a "bad man" was all at once 
turned into a " saint," a good man. The hitherto 
existing psychology was wrecked at this point ; is 
it not possible it may have happened principally 
because psychology had placed itself under the 
dominion of morals, because it believed in opposi- 
tions of moral values, and saw, read, and iriterpreted 
these oppositions into the text and facts of the 
case? What? "Miracle" only an error of inter- 
pretation ? A lack of philology ? 



68 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

48. 

It seems that the Latin races are far more deeply 
attached to their Catholicism than we Northerners 
are to Christianity generally, and that consequently 
unbelief in Catholic countries means something 
quite different from what it does among Protestants 
— namely, a sort of revolt against the spirit of the 
race, while with us it is rather a return to the spirit 
(or non-spirit) of the race. We Northerners un- 
doubtedly derive our origin from barbarous races, 
even as regards our talents for religion — we have 
poor talents for it. One may make an exception 
in the case of the Celts, who have therefore furnished 
also the best soil for the Christian infection in the 
north : the Christian ideal blossomed forth in 
France as much as ever the pale sun of the north 
would allow it. How strangely pious for our taste 
are still these later French sceptics, whenever there 
is any Celtic blood in their origin ! How Catholic, 
how un-German does Auguste Comte's Sociology 
seem to us, with the Roman logic of its instincts ! 
How Jesuitical, that amiable and shrewd cicerone 
of Port-Royal, Sainte-Beuve, in spite of all his 
hostility to Jesuits ! And even Ernest Renan : 
how inaccessible to us Northerners does the lan- 
guage of such a Renan appear, in whom every 
instant the merest touch of religious thrill throws 
his refinedly voluptuous and comfortably couching 
soul off its balance ! Let us repeat after him these 
fine sentences — and what wickedness and haughti- 
ness is immediately aroused by way of answer in 
our probably less beautiful but harder souls, that is 



THE RELIGIOUS MOOD. 69 

to say, in our more German souls ! — " Disons done 
hardiment que la religion est un produit de rhomme 
normal^ que rhomine est le plus dans le vrai quand 
il est le plus religieux et le plus assure d^une destinie 
infinie, . . . Cest quand il est bon qu^il veut que 
la virtu corresponde a un order eternel^ cest quand 
il contemple les choses dune nianiere desinteressee 
qu'il trouve la ^nort revoltante et absurde. Comment 
ne pas supposer que cest dans ces moments-la^ qui 
rhomme voit le mieux?^^ . . . These sentences 
are so extremely antipodal to my ears and habits 
of thought, that in my first impulse of rage on 
finding them, I wrote on the margin, " la niaiserie 
religieuse par excellence !'' — until in my later rage I 
even took a fancy to them, these sentences with their 
truth absolutely inverted ! It is so nice and such 
a distinction to have one's own antipodes ! 

49. 

That which is so astonishing in the religious life 
of the ancient Greeks is the irrestrainable stream 
of gratitude which it pours forth — it is a very 
superior kind of man w^ho takes such an attitude 
towards nature and life. — Later on, when the popu- 
lace got the upper hand in Greece, fear became 
rampant also in religion ; and Christianity was 
preparing itself. 

SO. 

The passion for God : there are churlish, honest- 
hearted, and importunate kinds of it, like that of 
Luther — the whole of Protestantism lacks the 
southern delicatezza. There is an Oriental exalta- 



70 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

tion of the mind in it, like that of an undeservedly 
favoured or elevated slave, as in the case of St 
Augustine, for instance, who lacks in an offensive 
manner, all nobility in bearing and desires. There 
is a feminine tenderness and sensuality in it, which 
modestly and unconsciously longs for a unio niystica 
et physicUy as in the case of Madame de Guyon. In 
many cases it appears, curiously enough, as the 
disguise of a girFs or youth's puberty ; here and 
there even as the hysteria of an old maid, also 
as her last ambition. The Church has frequently 
canonised the woman in such a case. 

51. 

The mightiest men have hitherto always bowed 
reverently before the saint, as the enigma of self- 
subjugation and utter voluntary privation — why did 
they thus bow ? They divined in him — and as it 
were behind the questionableness of his frail and 
wretched appearance — the superior force which 
wished to test itself by such a subjugation ; the 
strength of will, in which they recognised their own 
strength and love of power, and knew how to 
honour it : they honoured something in themselves 
when they honoured the saint. In addition to this, 
the contemplation of the saint suggested to them a 
suspicion : such an enormity of self-negation and 
anti-naturalness will not have been coveted for 
nothing — they have said, inquiringly. There is 
perhaps a reason for it, some very great danger, 
about which the ascetic might wish to be more 
accurately informed through his secret interlocutors 
and visitors? In a word, the mighty ones of the 



THE RELIGIOUS MOOD. 7 1 

world learned to have a new fear before him, they 
divined a new power, a strange, still unconquered 
enemy : — it was the " Will to Power " which obliged 
them to halt before the saint. They had to question 
him. 

52. 

In the Jewish "Old Testament," the book of 
divine justice, there are men, things, and sayings on 
such an immense scale, that Greek and Indian 
literature has nothing to compare with it. One 
stands with fear and reverence before those stu- 
pendous remains of what man was formerly, and 
one has sad thoughts about old Asia and its little 
out-pushed peninsula Europe, which would like, by 
all means, to figure before Asia as the " Progress of 
Mankind." To be sure, he who is himself only a 
slender, tame house-animal, and knows only the 
wants of a house-animal (like our cultured people 
of to-day, including the Christians of " cultured " 
Christianity), need neither be amazed nor even sad 
amid those ruins — the taste for the Old Testament 
is a touchstone with respect to "great" and "small " : 
perhaps he will find that the New Testament, the 
book of grace, still appeals more to his heart (there 
is much of the odour of the genuine, tender, stupid 
beadsman and petty soul in it). To have bound up 
this New Testament (a kind of rococo of taste in 
every respect) along with the Old Testament into 
one book, as the " Bible," as " The Book in Itself," 
is perhaps the greatest audacity and " sin against 
the Spirit" which literary Europe has upon its 
conscience. 



72 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

Why Atheism nowadays ? " The father " in God 
is thoroughly refuted ; equally so " the judge," " the 
rewarder." Also his ** free will ": he does not hear 
— and even if he did, he would not know how to 
help. The worst is that he seems incapable of 
communicating himself clearly ; is he uncertain ? — 
This is what I have made out (by questioning, and 
listening at a variety of conversations) to be the 
cause of the decline of European theism ; it appears 
to me that though the religious instinct is in 
vigorous growth, — it rejects the theistic satisfaction 
with profound distrust. 

54. 

What does all modern philosophy mainly do? 
Since Descartes — and indeed more in defiance of 
him than on the basis of his procedure — an attentat 
has been made on the part of all philosophers on 
the old conception of the soul, under the guise of a 
criticism of the subject and predicate conception — 
that is to say, an attentat on the fundamental pre- 
supposition of Christian doctrine. Modern philo- 
sophy, as epistemological scepticism, is secretly or 
openly anti- Christian^ although (for keener ears, be 
it said) by no means anti-religious. Formerly, in 
effect, one believed in " the soul " as one believed 
in grammar and the grammatical subject : one 
said, ** I " is the condition, " think " is the predicate 
and is conditioned — to think is an activity for 
which one must suppose a subject as cause. The 
attempt was then made, with marvellous tenacity 



THE RELIGIOUS MOOD. 73 

and subtlety, to see if one could not get out of 
this net, — to see if the opposite was not perhaps 
true : " think " the condition, and " I " the con- 
ditioned ; " I," therefore, only a synthesis which 
has been "^nade by thinking itself Kant really 
wished to prove that, starting from the subject, the 
subject could not be proved — nor the object either : 
the possibility of an apparent existence of the subject, 
and therefore of " the soul," may not always have 
been strange to him, — the thought which once had 
an immense power on earth as the Vedanta philo- 
sophy, 

55. 
There is a great ladder of religious cruelty, with 
many rounds ; but three of these are the most 
important. Once on a time men sacrificed human 
beings to their God, and perhaps just those they 
loved the best — to this category belong the firstling 
sacrifices of all primitive religions, and also the 
sacrifice of the Emperor Tiberius in the Mithra- 
Grotto on the Island of Capri, that most terrible of 
all Roman anachronisms. Then, during the moral 
epoch of mankind, they sacrificed to their God the 
strongest instincts they possessed, their " nature " ; 
this festal joy shines in the cruel glances of ascetics 
and "anti-natural" fanatics. Finally, what still 
remained to be sacrificed ? Was it not necessary 
in the end for men to sacrifice everything comfort- 
ing, holy, healing, all hope, all faith in hidden 
harmonies, in future blessedness and justice? Was 
it not necessary to sacrifice God himself, and out 
of cruelty to themselves to worship stone, stupidity, 



74 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for 
nothingness — this paradoxical mystery of the ulti- 
mate cruelty has been reserved for the rising 
generation ; we all know something thereof already. 

56. 

Whoever, like myself, prompted by some enig- 
matical desire, has long endeavoured to go to the 
bottom of the question of pessimism and free it 
from the half-Christian, half-German narrowness 
and stupidity in which it has finally presented 
itself to this century, namely, in the form of 
Schopenhauer's philosophy ; whoever, with an 
Asiatic and super-Asiatic eye, has actually looked 
inside, and into the most world-renouncing of all 
possible modes of thought — beyond good and evil, 
and no longer like Buddha and Schopenhauer, 
under the dominion and delusion of morality, — 
whoever has done this, has perhaps just thereby, 
without really desiring it, opened his eyes to behold 
the opposite ideal : the ideal of the most world- 
approving, exuberant and vivacious man, who has 
not only learnt to compromise and arrange with 
that which was and is, but wishes to have it again 
as it was and is^ for all eternity, insatiably calling 
out da capo, not only to himself, but to the whole 
piece and play ; and not only to the play, but 
actually to him who requires the play — and makes 
it necessary ; because he always requires himself 
anew — and makes himself necessary. — — What ? 
And this would not be — circulus vitiosus deus ? 



THE RELIGIOUS MOOD. 75 

The distance, and as it were the space around 
man, grows with the strength of his intellectual 
vision and insight : his world becomes profounder ; 
new stars, new enigmas, and notions are ever 
coming into view. Perhaps everything on which 
the intellectual eye has exercised its acuteness and 
profundity has just been an occasion for its exercise, 
something of a game, something for children and 
childish minds. Perhaps the most solemn con- 
ceptions that have caused the most fighting and 
suffering, the conceptions " God " and " sin," will 
one day seem to us of no more importance than a 
child's plaything or a child's pain seems to an old 
man ;- — and perhaps another plaything and another 
pain will then be necessary once more for " the old 
man " — always childish enough, an eternal child ! 

58. 

Has it been observed to what extent outward 
idleness, or semi-idleness, is necessary to a real 
religious life (alike for its favourite microscopic 
labour of self-examination, and for its soft placidity 
called " prayer," the state of perpetual readiness for 
the "coming of God "), I mean the idleness with a 
good conscience, the idleness of olden times and of 
blood, to which the aristocratic sentiment that work 
is dishonouring — that it vulgarises body and soul — 
is not quite unfamiliar? And that consequently 
the modern, noisy, time-engrossing, conceited, 
foolishly proud laboriousness educates and pre- 
pares for " unbelief " more than anything else ? 



ye BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

Amongst these, for instance, who are at present 
living apart from religion in Germany, I find " free- 
thinkers " of diversified species and origin, but above 
all a majority of those in whom laboriousness from 
generation to generation has dissolved the religious 
instincts ; so that they no longer know what purpose 
religions serve, and only note their existence in the 
world with a kind of dull astonishment. They feel 
themselves already fully occupied, these good people, 
be it by their business or by their pleasures, not to 
mention the " Fatherland," and the newspapers, and 
their " family duties " ; it seems that they have no 
time w^hatever left for religion ; and above all, it is 
not obvious to them whether it is a question of a 
new business or a new pleasure — for it is impossible, 
they say to themselves, that people should go to 
church merely to spoil their tempers. They are by 
no means enemies of religious customs ; should 
certain circumstances. State affairs perhaps, require 
their participation in such customs, they do what is 
required, as so many things are done — with a 
patient and unassuming seriousness, and without 
much curiosity or discomfort ; — they live too much 
apart and outside to feel even the necessity for d.for 
or against in such matters. Among those indifferent 
persons may be reckoned nowadays the majority 
of German Protestants of the middle classes, 
especially in the great laborious centres of trade 
and commerce ; also the majority of laborious 
scholars, and the entire University personnel (with 
the exception of the theologians, whose existence 
and possibility there always gives psychologists new 
and more subtle puzzles to solve). On the part of 



THE RELIGIOUS MOOD. TJ 

pious, or merely church-going people, there is 
seldom any idea of how much goodwill, one might 
say arbitrary will, is now necessary for a German 
scholar to take the problem of religion seriously ; 
his whole profession (and as I have said, his whole 
workmanlike laboriousness, to which he is compelled 
by his modern conscience) inclines him to a lofty 
and almost charitable serenity as regards religion, 
with which is occasionally mingled a slight disdain 
for the " uncleanliness " of spirit which he takes for 
granted wherever any one still professes to belong 
to the Church. It is only with the help of history 
{not through his own personal experience, therefore) 
that the scholar succeeds in bringing himself to a 
respectful seriousness, and to a certain timid defer- 
ence in presence of religions ; but even when his 
sentiments have reached the stage of gratitude 
towards them, he has not personally advanced one 
step nearer to that which still maintains itself as 
Church or as piety ; perhaps even the contrary. The 
practical indifference to religious matters in the 
midst of which he has been born and brought up, 
usually sublimates itself in his case into circumspec- 
tion and cleanliness, which shuns contact with 
religious men and things ; and it may be just the 
depth of his tolerance and humanity which prompts 
him to avoid the delicate trouble which toleranec 
itself brings with it. — Every age has its own divine 
type of naivete, for the discovery of which other 
ages may envy it : and how much na'fvete — ador- 
able, childlike, and boundlessly foolish nai'vet6 
— is involved in this belief of the scholar in his 
superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, 



78 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

in the unsuspecting, simple certainty with which 
his instinct treats the religious man as a lower and 
less valuable type, beyond, before, and above which 
he himself has developed — he, the little arrogant 
dwarf and mob-man, the sedulously alert, head-and- 
hand drudge of " ideas," of " modern ideas "! 

59. 
Whoever has seen deeply into the world has 
doubtless divined what wisdom there is in the fact 
that men are superficial. It is their preservative 
instinct which teaches them to be flighty, lightsome, 
and false. Here and there one finds a passionate 
and exaggerated adoration of " pure forms " in 
philosophers as well as in artists : it is not to be 
doubted that whoever has need of the cult of the 
superficial to that extent, has at one time or another 
made an unlucky dive beneath it. Perhaps there is 
even an order of rank with respect to those burnt 
children, the born artists who find the enjoyment 
of life only in trying to falsify its image (as if 
taking wearisome revenge on it) ; one might guess 
to what degree life has disgusted them, by the 
extent to which they wish to see its image falsified, 
attenuated, ultrified, and deified ; — one might reckon 
the homines religiosi amongst the artists, as their 
highest rank. It is the profound, suspicious fear 
of an incurable pessimism which compels whole 
centuries to fasten their teeth into a religious inter- 
pretation of existence : the fear of the instinct 
which divines that truth might be attained too 
soon, before man has become strong enough, hard 
enough, artist enough • . . Piety, the "Life in 



THE RELIGIOUS MOOD. 79 

God," regarded in this light, would appear as the 
most elaborate and ultimate product of the fear of 
truth, as artist-adoration and artist-intoxication in 
presence of the most logical of all falsifications, as 
the will to the inversion of truth, to untruth at any 
price. Perhaps there has hitherto been no more 
effective means of beautifying man than piety ; by 
means of it man can become so artful, so super- 
ficial, so iridescent, and so good, that his appear- 
ance no longer offends. 

60. 

To love mankind^;' God's sake — this has so far 
been the noblest and remotest sentiment to which 
mankind has attained. That love to mankind, 
without any redeeming intention in the background, 
is only an additional folly and brutishness, that the 
inclination to this love has first to get its propor- 
tion, its delicacy, its grain of salt and sprinkling of 
ambergris from a higher inclination : — whoever first 
perceived and "experienced" this, however his 
tongue may have stammered as it attempted to 
express such a delicate matter, let him for all time 
be holy and respected, as the man who has so far 
flown highest and gone astray in the finest fashion ! 

61. 

\ The philosopher, as we free spirits understand 
him — as the man of the greatest responsibility, who 
has the conscience for the general development of 
mankind, — will use religion for his disciplining and 
educating work, just as he will use the contem- 
porary political and economic conditions. The 



80 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

selecting and disciplining influence — destructive, as 
well as creative and fashioning — which can be exer- 
cised by means of religion is manifold and varied, 
according to the sort of people placed under its 
spell and protection. For those who are strong and 
independent, destined and trained to command, in 
whom the judgment and skill of a ruling race is 
incorporated, religion is an additional means for 
overcoming resistance in the exercise of authority 
— as a bond which binds rulers and subjects in 
common, betraying and surrendering to the former 
the conscience of the latter, their inmost heart, 
which would fain escape obedience. And in the 
case of the unique natures of noble origin, if by 
virtue of superior spirituality they should incline 
to a more retired and contemplative life, reserving 
to themselves only the more refined forms of 
government (over chosen disciples or members of 
an order), religion itself may be used as a means 
for obtaining peace from the noise and trouble of 
msindigmg grosser affairs, and for securing immunity 
from the unavoidable filth of all political agita- 
tion. The Brahmins, for instance, understood this 
fact With the help of a religious organisation, 
they secured to themselves the power of nominat- 
ing kings for the people, while their sentiments 
prompted them to keep apart and outside, as men 
with a higher and super-regal mission. At the 
same time religion gives inducement and oppor- 
tunity to some of the subjects to qualify themselves 
for future ruling and commanding : the slowly 
ascending ranks and classes, in which, through 
fortunate marriage customs, volitional power and 



THE RELIGIOUS MOOD. 8 1 

delight in self-control are on the increase. To them 
religion offers sufficient incentives and temptations 
to aspire to higher intellectuality, and to experience 
the sentiments of authoritative self-control, of 
silence, and of solitude. Asceticism and Puritanism 
are almost indispensable means of educating and 
ennobling a race which seeks to rise above its 
hereditary baseness and work itself upward to 
future supremacy. And finally, to ordinary men, 
to the majority of the people, who exist for 
service and general utility, and are only so far 
entitled to exist, religion gives invaluable con- 
tentedness with their lot and condition, peace of 
heart, ennoblement of obedience, additional social 
happiness and sympathy, with something of trans- 
figuration and embellishment, something of justifica- 
tion of all the commonplaceness, all the meanness, 
all the semi-animal poverty of their souls. Reli- 
gion, together with the religious significance of life, 
sheds sunshine over such perpetually harassed 
men, and makes even their own aspect endurable 
to them ; it operates upon them as the Epicurean 
philosophy usually operates upon sufferers of a 
higher order, in a refreshing and refining manner, 
almost turning suffering to account, and in the end 
even hallowing and vindicating it There is per- 
haps nothing so admirable in Christianity and 
Buddhism as their art of teaching even the lowest 
to elevate themselves by piety to a seemingly 
higher order of things, and thereby to retain their 
satisfaction with the actual world in which they 
find it difficult enough to live — this very difficulty 
being necessary. 

P 



82 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

62. 

To be sure — to make also the bad counter- 
reckoning against such religions, and to bring to 
light their secret dangers — the cost is always ex- 
cessive and terrible when religions do not operate 
as an educational and disciplinary medium in the 
hands of the philosopher, but rule voluntarily and 
paramountly^ when they wish to be the final end, and 
not a means along with other means. Among men, 
as among all other animals, there is a surplus of 
defective, diseased, degenerating, infirm, and neces- 
sarily suffering individuals; the successful cases, 
among men also, are always the exception ; and in 
view of the fact that man is the animal not yet 
properly adapted to his enviromnent, the rare excep- 
tion. But worse still The higher the type a man 
represents, the greater is the improbability that he 
will succeed ; the accidental, the law of irrationality 
in the general constitution of mankind, manifests 
itself most terribly in its destructive effect on the 
higher orders of men, the conditions of whose lives 
are delicate, diverse, and difficult to determine. 
What, then, is the attitude of the two greatest 
religions above-mentioned to the surplus of failures 
in life? They endeavour to preserve and keep 
alive whatever can be preserved ; in fact, as the 
religions for sufferers^ they take the part of these 
upon principle ; they are always in favour of those 
who suffer from life as from a disease, and they 
would fain treat every other experience of life as 
false and impossible. However highly we may 
esteem this indulgent and preservative care (inas- 



THE RELIGIOUS MOOD. 83 

much as in applying to others, it has applied, and 
applies also to the highest and usually the most 
suffering type of man), the hitherto paramount 
religions — to give a general appreciation of them — 
are among the principal causes which have kept the 
type of " man " upon a lower level — they have pre- 
served too much that which should have perished. 
One has to thank them for invaluable services ; and 
who is sufficiently rich in gratitude not to feel poor 
at the contemplation of all that the " spiritual men " 
of Christianity have done for Europe hitherto ! But 
when they had given comfort to the sufferers, 
courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and 
support to the helpless, and when they had allured 
from society into convents and spiritual peni- 
tentiaries the broken-hearted and distracted: what 
else had they to do in order to work systematically 
in that fashion, and with a good conscience, for the 
preservation of all the sick and suffering, which 
means, in deed and in truth, to work for the deterio- 
ration of the European race ? To reverse all esti- 
mates of value — that is what they had to do ! And 
to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast 
suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down 
everything autonomous, manly, conquering, and 
imperious — all instincts which are natural to the 
highest and most successful type of " man " — into 
uncertainty, distress of conscience, and self-destruc- 
tion ; forsooth, to invert all love of the earthly and 
of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the 
earth and earthly things — that is the task the Church 
imposed on itself, and was obliged to impose, until, 
according to its standard of value, " unworldliness/' 



84 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

^* unsensuousness," and " higher man " fused into 
one sentiment If one could observe the strangely- 
painful, equally coarse and refined comedy of 
European Christianity with the derisive and im- 
partial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think one 
would never cease marvelling and laughing ; does 
it not actually seem that some single will has ruled 
over Europe for eighteen centuries in order to 
make a sublime abortion of man? He, however, 
who, with opposite requirements (no longer 
Epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his 
hand, could approach this almost voluntary degene- 
ration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified 
in the European Christian (Pascal, for instance), 
would he not have to cry aloud with rage, pity, 
and horror : " Oh, you bunglers, presumptuous 
pitiful bunglers, what have you done ! Was that a 
work for your hands ? How you have hacked and 
botched my finest stone ! What havej^^^ presumed 
to do!" — I should say that Christianity has hitherto 
been the most portentous of presumptions. Men, 
not great enough, nor hard enough, to be entitled 
as artists to take part in fashioning man ; men, not 
sufficiently strong and far-sighted to alloWy with 
sublime self-constraint, the obvious law of the 
thousandfold failures and perishings to prevail ; 
men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically dif- 
ferent grades of rank and intervals of rank that 
separate man from man : — such men, with their 
" equality before God," have hitherto swayed the 
destiny of Europe ; until at last a dwarfed, almost 
ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious 
animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the 
European of the present day. 



FOURTH CHAPTER. 

APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES. 

63. 
He who IS a thorough teacher takes things seriously 
— and even himself — only in relation to his pupils. 

64. 

" Knowledge for its own sake " — that is the last 
snare laid by morality : we are thereby completely 
entangled in morals once more. 

65. 

The charm of knowledge would be small, were it 
not that so much shame has to be overcome on 
the way to it 

65A. 

We are most dishonourable towards our God : he 
is not permitted to sin. 

The tendency of a person to allow himself to be 
degraded, robbed, deceived, and exploited might 
be the diffidence of a God amongst men. 

67. 

Love to one only is a barbarity, for it is exercised 
at the expense of all others. Love to God also ! 



86 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

68. 

" I did that," says my memory. " 1 could not 
have done that," says my pride, and remains in- 
exorable. Eventually — the memory yields. 

69. 

One has regarded life carelessly, if one has failed 
to see the hand that — kills with leniency. 

70. 

If a man has character, he has also his typical 
experience, which always recurs. 

71- 

The Sage as Astronomer. — So long as thou feeiest 
the stars as an " above thee," thou lackest the eye 
of the discerning one. 

72. 

It is not the strength, but the duration of great 
sentiments that makes great men. 

73. 
He who attains his ideal, precisely thereby 
surpasses it. 

73A. 
Many a peacock hides his tail from every eye — 
and calls it his pride. 

74. 

A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possess 
at least two things besides : gratitude and purity. 



APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES. 8/ 

75. 
The degree and nature of a man's sensuality 
extends to the highest altitudes of his spirit 

76. 

Under peaceful conditions the militant man 
attacks himself. 

With his principles a man seeks either to domi- 
nate, or justify, or honour, or reproach, or conceal 
his habits : two men with the same principles 
probably seek fundamentally different ends there- 
with. 

78. 

He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems 
himself thereby, as a des- iser. 

79. 
A soul which knows that it is loved, but does not 
itself love, betrays its sediment : its dregs come up. 

80. 

A thing that is explained ceases to concern us. — 
What did the God mean who gave the advice, 
"Know thyself!" Did it perhaps imply : "Cease 
to be concerned about thyself! become objective !" 
— And Socrates ? — And the " scientific man "? 

81. 

It is terrible to die of thirst at sea. Is it necessary 
that you should so salt your truth that it will no 
longer — quench thirst ? 



88 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

82. 

"Sympathy for all" — would be harshness and 
tyranny for theCy my good neighbour ! 

83. 

Instinct. — When the house is on fire one forgets 
even the dinner. — Yes, but one recovers it from 
amongst the ashes. 

84. 

Woman learns how to hate in proportion as she — 
forgets how to charm. 

85. 

The same emotions are in man and woman, but 
in different tempo ; on that account man and woman 
never cease to misunderstand each other. 

86. 

In the background of all their personal vanity, 
women themselves have still their impersonal 
scorn — for " woman." 

87. 

Fettered Hearty Free Spirit. — When one firmly 
fetters one's heart and keeps it prisoner, one can 
allow one's spirit many liberties : I said this once 
before. But people do not believe it when I say 
so, unless they know it already. 

88. 

One begins to distrust very clever persons when 
they become embarrassed. 



APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES 89 

89. 

Dreadful experiences raise the question whether 
he who experiences them is not something dreadful 
also. 

90. 

Heavy, melancholy men turn lighter, and come 
temporarily to their surface, precisely by that 
which makes others heavy — by hatred and love. 

91. 

So cold, so icy, that one burns one's finger at 
the touch of him ! Every hand that lays hold of 
him shrinks back ! — And for that very reason 
many think him red-hot. 

92. 

Who has not, at one time or another — sacrificed 
himself for the sake of his good name? 

93. 

In affability there is no hatred of men, but 
precisely on that account a great deal too much 
contempt of men. 

94. 

The maturity of man — that means, to have 
reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child 
at play. 

95- 

To be ashamed of one's immorality is a step on 
the ladder at the end of which one is ashamed also 
of one's morality. 



90 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

96. 
^ One should part from life as Ulysses parted 
from Nausicaa — blessing it rather than in love 
with it. 

97. 
What? A great man? I always see merely 
the play-actor of his own ideal. 

98. 

When one trains one's conscience, it kisses one 
while it bites. 

99. 

The Disappointed One Speaks, — " I listened for 
the echo and I heard only praise." 

100. 
We all feign to ourselves that we are simpler 
than we are ; we thus relax ourselves away from 
our fellows. 

lOI. 

A discerning one might easily regard himself at 
present as the animalisation of God. 

102. 
Discovering reciprocal love should really dis- 
enchant the lover with regard to the beloved. 
" What ! She is modest enough to love even you ? 
Or stupid enough ? Or — or " 

103. 
The Danger in Happiness. — "Everything now 
turns out best for me, I now love every fate : — who 
would like to be my fate ? " 



APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES. 9I 

104. 

Not their love of humanity, but the impotence of 
their love, prevents the Christians of to-day — 
burning us. 

105. 

Th^ptafraus is still more repugnant to the taste 
{the ^^ piety ") of the free spirit (the " pious man of 
knowledge") than the impia fraus. Hence the 
profound lack of judgment, in comparison with the 
church, characteristic of the type " free spirit " — as 
its non-freedom. 

106. 

By means of music the very passions enjoy 
themselves. 

107. 

A sign of strong character, when once the 
resolution has been taken, to shut the ear even to 
the best counter-arguments. Occasionally, there- 
fore, a will to stupidity. 

108. 
There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but 
only a moral interpretation of phenomena. 

109. 
The criminal is often enough not equal to his 
deed : he extenuates and maligns it. 

no. 

The advocates of a criminal are seldom artists 
enough to turn the beautiful terribleness of the 
deed to the advantage of the doer. 



92 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

III. 

Our vanity is most difficult to wound just when 
our pride has been wounded. 

112. 

To him who feels himself preordained to con- 
templation and not to belief, all believers are too 
noisy and obtrusive ; he guards against them. 

113. 

"You want to prepossess him in your favour? 
Then you must be embarrassed before him." 

114. 

The immense expectation with regard to sexual 
love, and the coyness in this expectation, spoils all 
the perspectives of women at the outset. 

115. 

Where there is neither love nor hatred in the 
game, woman's play is mediocre. 

116, 
The great epochs of our life are at the points 
when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as 
the best in us. 

117. 
The will to overcome an emotion, is ultimately 
only the will of another, or of several other, 
emotions. 

118. 
There is an innocence of admiration: it is 



APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES. 93 

possessed by him to whom it has not yet occurred 
that he himself may be admired some day. 

119. 

Our loathing of dirt may be so great as to 
prevent us cleaning ourselves — "justifying" our- 
selves. 

120. 

Sensuality often forces the growth of love too 
much, so that its root remains weak, and is easily 
torn up. 

121. 
It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when 
he wished to turn author — and that he did not learn 
it better. 

122. 

To rejoice on account of praise is in many cases 
merely politeness of heart — and the very opposite 
of vanity of spirit. 

123. 

Even concubinage has been corrupted — by 
marriage. 

124. 
He who exults at the stake, does not triumph 
over pain, but because of the fact that he does not 
feel pain where he expected it A parable. 

125. 
When we have to change an opinion about any 
one, we charge heavily to his account the incon- 
venience he thereby causes us. 



94 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

126. 
A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or 
seven great men. — Yes, and then to get round them. 

127. 
In the eyes of all true women science is hostile to 
the sense of shame. They feel as if one wished to 
peep under their skin with it — or worse still ! under 
their dress and finery. 

128. 

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, 
the more must you allure the senses to it. 

129. 

The devil has the most extensive perspectives for 
God ; on that account he keeps so far away from 
him : — the devil, in effect, as the oldest friend of 
knowledge. 

130. 
What a person is begins to betray itself when 
his talent decreases, — when he ceases to show what 
he can do. Talent is also an adornment ; an 
adornment is also a concealment. 

131. 

The sexes deceive themselves about each other : 
the reason is that in reality they honour and love 
only themselves (or their own ideal, to express it 
more agreeably). Thus man wishes woman to be 
peaceable : but in fact woman is essentially unpeace- 
able, like the cat, however well she may have 
assumed the peaceable demeanour. 



APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES. 95 

132. 

One is punished best for one's virtues. 

133- 
He who cannot find the way to his ideal, lives 
more frivolously and shamelessly than the man 
without an ideal. 

134- 

From the senses originate all trustworthiness, all 
good conscience, all evidence of truth. 

135. 
Pharisaism is not a deterioration of the good man ; 
a considerable part of it is rather an essential condi- 
tion of being good. 

136. 
The one seeks an accoucheur for his thoughts, the 
other seeks some one whom he can assist : a good 
conversation thus originates. ^ 

137. 

In intercourse with scholars and artists one 
readily makes mistakes of opposite kinds : in a 
remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a 
mediocre man ; and often even in a mediocre artist, 
one finds a very remarkable man. 

138. 

We do the same when awake as when dreaming: 
we only invent and imagine him with whom we 
have intercourse — and forget it immediately. 



96 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

139. 

In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous 
than man. 

140. 

Advice as a Riddle. — " If the band is not to break, 
bite it first — secure to make !" 

141. 

The belly is the reason why man does not so 
readily take himself for a God = 

142. 

The chastest utterance I ever heard : " Dans le 
veritable amour dest Vdme qui enveloppe le corps!' 

143. 
Our vanity would like what we do best to pass 
precisely for what is most difficult to us. — Con- 
cerning the origin of many systems of morals. 

144. 

When a woman has scholarly inclinations there 
is generally something wrong with her sexual 
nature. Barrenness itself conduces to a certain 
virility of taste ; man, indeed, if I may say so, is 
" the barren animal." 

145. 
Comparing man and woman generally, one may 
say that woman would not have the genius for 
adornment, if she had not the instinct for the 
secondary role. 



APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES. 97 

146. 
He who fights with monsters should be careful 
lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou 
gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze 
into thee. 

147. 
From old Florentine novels — moreover, from life : 
Buona femmina e mala femmina vuol bastone, — 
Sacchetti, Nov. 86. 

148. 
To seduce their neighbour to a favourable opinion, 
and afterwards to believe implicitly in this opinion 
of their neighbour — who can do this conjuring trick 
so well as women ? 

149. 
That which an age considers evil is usually an 
unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered 
good — the atavism of an old ideal. 

150. 
Around the hero everything becomes a tragedy ; 
around the demigod everything becomes a satyr- 
play ; and around God everything becomes — what ? 
perhaps a " world " ? 

151. 

It IS not enough to possess a talent : one must 
also have your permission to possess it ; — eh, my 
friends ? 

152. 
" Where there is the tree of knowledge, there is 
always Paradise : " so say the most ancient and the 
most modern serpents. 

G 



98 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

153. 

What IS done out of love always takes place 
beyond good and evil. 

154. 
Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of 
irony are signs of health ; everything absolute 
belongs to pathology. 

155. 
The sense of the tragic increases and declines 
with sensuousness. » 

156. 

Insanity in individuals is something rare — but in 
groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rula 

157. 
The thought of suicide is a great consolation : 
by means of it one gets successfully through many 
a bad night. 

158. 

Not only our reason, but also our conscience, 
truckles to our strongest impulse — the tyrant in us. 

159. 

One must repay good and ill ; but why just to 
the person who did us good or ill ? 

160. 

One no longer loves one's knowledge sufficiently 
after one has communicated it. 



APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES. 99 

161. 

Poets act shamelessly towards their experiences : 
they exploit them. 

162. 

"Our fellow-creature is not our neighbour, but 
our neighbour's neighbour : " — so thinks every 
nation. 

163. 

Love brings to light the noble and hidden 
qualities of a lover — his rare and exceptional traits : 
it is thus liable to be deceptive as to his normal 
character. 

164. 

Jesus said to his Jews : " The law was for 
servants ; — love God as I love him, as his Son ! 
What have we Sons of God to do with morals ! " 

165. 

In Sight of every Party, — A shepherd has always 
need of a bell-wether — or he has himself to be a 
wether occasionally. 

166. 

One may indeed lie with the mouth ; but with 
the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells 
the truth. 

167. 

To vigorous men intimacy is a matter of shame 
— and something precious. 

168. 
Christianity gave Eros poison to drink ; he did 
not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice. 



lOO BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

169. 
To talk much about oneself may also be a means 
of concealing oneself. 

170. 
In praise there is more obtrusiveness than in 
blame. 

171. 

Pity has an almost ludicrous effect on a man of 
knowledge, like tender hands on a Cyclops. 

172. 

One occasionally embraces some one or other, out 
of love to mankind (because one cannot embrace 
all) ; but this is what one must never confess to the 
individual. 

173. 

One does not hate as long as one disesteems, 
but only when one esteems equal or superior. 

174. 
Ye Utilitarians — ye, too, love the utile only as a 
vehicle for your inclinations, — ye, too, really find the 
noise of its wheels insupportable ! 

175. 
One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing 
desired. 

176. 
The vanity of others is only counter to our taste 
when it is counter to our vanity. 



APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES. lOI 

177. 

With regard to what " truthfulness " is, perhaps 
nobody has ever been sufficiently truthful. 

178. 

One does not believe in the follies of clever men : 
what a forfeiture of the rights of man ! 

179. 
The consequences of our actions seize us by the 
forelock, very indifferent to the fact that we have 
meanwhile " reformed." 

180. 
There is an innocence in lying which is the sign / 
of good faith in a cause. 

181. 
It is inhuman to bless when one is being cursed. 

182. 
The familiarity of superiors embitters one, be- 
cause it may not be returned. 

183. 

" I am affected, not because you have deceived 
me, but because I can no longer believe in you." 

184. 
There is a haughtiness of kindness which has the 
appearance of wickedness. 

185. 

" I dislike him." — Why ? — " I am not a match 
for him." — Did any one ever answer so ? 



FIFTH CHAPTER. 
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. 

1 86. 

The moral sentiment in Europe at present is 
perhaps as subtle, belated, diverse, sensitive, and 
refined, as the " Science of Morals " belonging 
thereto is recent, initial, awkward, and coarse- 
fingered : — an interesting contrast, which sometimes 
becomes incarnate and obvious in the very person 
of a moralist. Indeed, the expression, " Science of 
Morals " is, in respect to what is designated thereby, 
far too presumptuous and counter to good taste, 
— which is always a foretaste of more modest ex- 
pressions. One ought to avow with the utmost 
fairness what is still necessary here for a long time, 
what is alone proper for the present : namely, the 
collection of material, the comprehensive survey 
and classification of an immense domain of deli- 
cate sentiments of worth, and distinctions of worth, 
which live, grow, propagate, and perish — and per- 
haps attempts to give a clear idea of the recurring 
and more common forms of these living crystallisa- 
tions — as preparation for a theory of types of 
morality. To be sure, people have not hitherto 
been so modest. All the philosophers, with a 



104 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

pedantic and ridiculous seriousness, demanded of 
themselves something very much higher, more pre- 
tentious, and ceremonious, when they concerned 
themselves with morality as a science : they wanted 
to give a basis to morality — and every philosopher 
hitherto has believed that he has given it a basis ; 
morality itself, however, has been regarded as 
something " given." How far from their awkward 
pride was the seemingly insignificant problem — left 
in dust and decay — of a description of forms of 
morality, notwithstanding that the finest hands and 
senses could hardly be fine enough for it ! It was 
precisely owing to moral philosophers knowing the 
moral facts imperfectly, in an arbitrary epitome, or 
an accidental abridgment — perhaps as the morality 
of their environment, their position, their church, 
their Zeitgeist^ their climate and zone — it was pre- 
cisely because they were badly instructed with 
regard to nations, eras, and past ages, and were by 
no means eager to know about these matters, that 
they did not even come in sight of the real problems 
of morals — problems which only disclose themselves 
by a comparison of many kinds of morality. In 
every '* Science of Morals " hitherto, strange as it 
may sound, the problem of morality itself has been 
omitted ; there has been no suspicion that there 
was anything problematic there ! That which 
philosophers called "giving a basis to morality,'* 
and endeavoured to realise, has, when seen in a 
right light, proved merely a learned form of good 
faith in prevailing morality, a new means of its ex- 
pressiouy consequently just a matter-of-fact within 
the sphere of a definite morality, yea, in its ultimate 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. 105 

motive, a sort of denial that it is lawful for this 
morality to be called in question — and in any case 
the reverse of the testing, analysing, doubting, and 
vivisecting of this very faith. Hear, for instance, 
with what innocence — almost worthy of honour — 
Schopenhauer represents his own task, and draw 
your conclusions concerning the scientificalness of 
a " Science " whose latest master still talks in the 
strain of children and old wives : '* The principle," 
he says (page 136 of the Gri^ndprobleme der 
Ethik *), " the axiom about the purport of which 
all moralists are practically agreed : neminem Icede^ 
immo omnes quantum potes juva — is really the pro- 
position which all moral teachers strive to establish, 
. . . the real basis of ethics which has been sought, 
like the philosopher's stone, for centuries." — The 
difficulty of establishing the proposition referred 
to may indeed be great— it is well known that 
Schopenhauer also was unsuccessful in his efforts ; 
and whoever has thoroughly realised how absurdly 
false and sentimental this proposition is, in a world 
whose essence is Will to Power, may be reminded 
that Schopenhauer, although a pessimist, actually — 
played the flute . . . daily after dinner : one may 
read about the matter in his biography. A ques- 
tion by the way : a pessimist, a repudiator of God 
and of the world, who makes a halt at morality — 
who assents to morality, and plays the flute to 
Icede-neminem morals, what? Is that really — a 
pessimist ? 



* Pages 54-55 of Schopenhauer's Basis of Morality^ trans- 
lated by Arthur B. Bullock, M.A. (1903). 



I06 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

187. 
Apart from the value of such assertions as " there 
is a categorical imperative in us," one can always 
ask : What does such an assertion indicate about 
him who makes it ? There are systems of morals 
which are meant to justify their author in the eyes 
of other people ; other systems of morals are meant 
to tranquillise him, and make him self-satisfied ; 
with other systems he wants to crucify and humble 
himself; with others he wishes to take revenge; 
with others to conceal himself; with others to 
glorify himself and gain superiority and distinction ; 
— this system of morals helps its author to forget, 
that system makes him, or something of him, for- 
gotten ; many a moralist would like to exercise 
power and creative arbitrariness over mankind ; 
many another, perhaps, Kant especially, gives us to 
understand by his morals that " what is estimable 
in me, is that I know how to obey — and with you 
it shall not be otherwise than with me !" In short, 
systems of morals are only a sign-language of the 
emotions. 

188. 
In contrast to laisser-aller, every system of morals 
is a sort of tyranny against "nature" and also 
against "reason"; that is, however, no objection, 
unless one should again decree by some system of 
morals, that all kinds of tyranny and unreasonable- 
ness are unlawful. What is essential and invalu- 
able in every system of morals, is that it is a long 
constraint. In order to understand Stoicism, or 
Port-Royal, or Puritanism, one should remember 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. lO/ 

the constraint under which every language has 
attained to strength and freedom — the metrical 
constraint, the tyranny of rhyme and rhythm. How 
much trouble have the poets and orators of every 
nation given themselves ! — not excepting some of 
the prose writers of to-day, in whose ear dwells an 
inexorable conscientiousness — " for the sake of a 
folly," as utilitarian bunglers say, and thereby deem 
themselves wise — " from submission to arbitrary 
laws," as the anarchists say, and thereby fancy 
themselves " free,'' even free-spirited. The singular 
fact remains, however, that everything of the nature 
of freedom, elegance, boldness, dance, and masterly 
certainty, which exists or has existed, whether it be 
in thought itself, or in administration, or in speaking 
and persuading, in art just as in conduct, has only 
developed by means of the tyranny of such arbi- 
trary law ; and in all seriousness, it is not at all 
improbable that precisely this is " nature " and 
" natural " — and not laisser-aller ! Every artist 
knows how different from the state of letting him- 
self go, is his " most natural " condition, the free 
arranging, locating, disposing, and constructing in 
the moments of "inspiration" — and how strictly 
and delicately he then obeys a thousand laws, 
which, by their very rigidness and precision, defy 
all formulation by means of ideas (even the most 
stable idea has, in comparison therewith, some- 
thing floating, manifold, and ambiguous in it). 
The essential thing " in heaven and in earth " is, 
apparently (to repeat it once more), that there 
should be long obedience in the same direction ; 
there thereby results, and has always resulted in 



I08 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

the long run, something which has made life worth 
living ; for instance, virtue, art, music, dancing, 
reason, spirituality — anything whatever that is 
transfiguring, refined, foolish, or divine. The long 
bondage of the spirit, the distrustful constraint in 
the communicability of ideas, the discipline which 
the thinker imposed on himself to think in accord- 
ance with the rules of a church or a court, or con- 
formable to Aristotelian premises, the persistent 
spiritual will to interpret everything that happened 
according to a Christian scheme, and in every oc- 
currence to rediscover and justify the Christian God : 
— all this violence, arbitrariness, severity, dread ful- 
ness, and unreasonableness, has proved itself the 
disciplinary means whereby the European spirit has 
attained its strength, its remorseless curiosity and 
subtle mobility ; granted also that much irrecover- 
able strength and spirit had to be stifled, suffocated, 
and spoilt in the process (for here, as everywhere, 
" nature " shows herself as she is, in all her extrava- 
gant and indifferent magnificence, which is shock- 
ing, but nevertheless noble). That for centuries 
European thinkers only thought in order to prove 
something — nowadays, on the contrary, we are 
suspicious of every thinker who " wishes to prove 
something '' — that it was always settled beforehand 
what was to be the result of their strictest thinking, 
as it was perhaps in the Asiatic astrology of former 
times, or as it is still at the present day in the 
innocent, Christian-moral explanation of immediate 
personal events " for the glory of God," or " for the 
good of the soul " : — this tyranny, this arbitrariness, 
this severe and magnificent stupidity, has educated 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. IO9 

the spirit ; slavery, both in the coarser and the finer 
sense, is apparently an indispensable means even 
of spiritual education and discipline. One may 
look at every system of morals in this light : it is 
" nature " therein which teaches to hate the laisser- 
aller^ the too great freedom, and implants the need 
for limited horizons, for immediate duties — it 
teaches the narrowing of perspectives^ and thus, in a 
certain sense, that stupidity is a condition of life 
and development. " Thou must obey some one, 
and for a long time ; otherwise thou wilt come to 
grief, and lose all respect for thyself" — this seems to 
me to be the moral imperative of nature, which is 
certainly neither " categorical,'' as old Kant wished 
(consequently the " otherwise "), nor does it address 
itself to the individual (what does nature care for 
the individual !), but to nations, races, ages, and 
ranks, above all, however, to the animal "man" 
generally, to mankind. 

189. 

Industrious races find it a great hardship to be 
idle : it was a master stroke of English instinct to 
hallow and begloom Sunday to such an extent that 
the Englishman unconsciously hankers for his week- 
and work-day again : — as a kind of cleverly devised, 
cleverly intercalated /"^i"/, such as is also frequently 
found in the ancient world (although, as is appro- 
priate in southern nations, not precisely with respect 
to work). Many kinds of fasts are necessary ; and 
wherever powerful impulses and habits prevail, legis- 
lators have to see that intercalary days are appointed, 
on which such impulses are fettered, and learn to 



no BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

hunger anewe Viewed from a higher standpoint, 
whole generations and epochs, when they show 
themselves infected with any moral fanaticism, 
seem like those intercalated periods of restraint and 
fasting, during which an impulse learns to humble 
and submit itself — at the same time also \.o purify 
and sharpen itself ; certain philosophical sects like- 
wise admit of a similar interpretation (for instance, 
the Stoa, in the midst of Hellenic culture, with the 
atmosphere rank and overcharged with Aphro- 
disiacal odours). — Here also is a hint for the ex- 
planation of the paradox, why it was precisely in 
the most Christian period of European history, and 
in general only under the pressure of Christian 
sentiments, that the sexual impulse sublimated 
into love {amour-passion), 

190. 
There is something in the morality of Plato which 
does not really belong to Plato, but which only 
appears in his philosophy, one might say, in spite 
of him : namely, Socratism, for which he himself 
was too noble. " No one desires to injure himself, 
hence all evil is done unwittingly. The evil man 
inflicts injury on himself ; he would not do so, how- 
ever, if he knew that evil is evil. The evil man, 
therefore, is only evil through error ; if one free 
him from error one will necessarily make him — 
good." — This mode of reasoning savours of the 
populace^ who perceive only the unpleasant con- 
sequences of evil-doing, and practically judge that 
" it is stupid to do wrong " ; while they accept 
" good " as identical with " useful and pleasant," 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. Ill 

Without further thought. As regards every system 
of utilitarianism, one may at once assume that it 
has the same origin, and follow the scent : one 
will seldom err. — Plato did all he could to interpret 
something refined and noble into the tenets of his 
teacher, and above all to interpret himself into them 
— he, the most daring of all interpreters, who lifted 
the entire Socrates out of the street, as a popular 
theme and song, to exhibit him in endless and im- 
possible modifications — namely, in all his own dis- 
guises and multiplicities. In jest, and in Homeric 
language as well, what is the Platonic Socrates, if 
not — 

irpoa-de ILXdTO)v oiriOkv re UXaTiav fikcrcnr) re Xi^Lcatpa. 
191. 

The old theological problem of " Faith " and 
" Knowledge," or more plainly, of instinct and 
reason — the question whether, in respect to the 
valuation of things, instinct deserves more authority 
than rationality, which wants to appreciate and act 
according to motives, according to a " Why," that is 
to say, in conformity to purpose and utility — it is 
always the old moral problem that first appeared in 
the person of Socrates, and had divided men's minds 
long before Christianity. Socrates himself, follow- 
ing, of course, the taste of his talent — that of a 
surpassing dialectician — took first the side of reason ; 
and, in fact, what did he do all his life but laugh at 
the awkward incapacity of the noble Athenians, 
who were men of instinct, like all noble men, and 
could never give satisfactory answers concerning 
the motives of their actions ? In the end, however, 



112 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

though Silently and secretly, he laughed also at him- 
self : with his finer conscience and introspection, 
he found in himself the same difficulty and incapa- 
city. " But why " — he said to himself — " should 
one on that account separate oneself from the in- 
stincts ! One must set them right, and the reason 
also — one must follow the instincts, but at the same 
time persuade the reason to support them with good 
arguments." This was the real falseness of that 
great and mysterious ironist ; he brought his con- 
science up to the point that he was satisfied with a 
kind of self-outwitting : in fact, he perceived the 
irrationality in the moral judgment. — Plato, more 
innocent in such matters, and without the crafti- 
ness of the plebeian, wished to prove to himself, at 
the expenditure of all his strength — the greatest 
strength a philosopher had ever expended — that 
reason and instinct lead spontaneously to one goal, 
to the good, to " God " ; and since Plato, all theo- 
logians and philosophers have followed the same 
path — which means that in matters of morality, 
instinct (or as Christians call it, " Faith," or as I call 
it, " the herd '') has hitherto triumphed. Unless 
one should make an exception in the case of 
Descartes, the father of rationalism (and con- 
sequently the grandfather of the Revolution), who 
recognised only the authority of reason : but reason 
is only a tool, and Descartes was superficial. 

192. 
Whoever has followed the history of a single 
science, finds in its development a clue to the under- 
standing of the oldest and commonest processes of 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. II3 

all " knowledge and cognisance ": there, as here, the 
premature hypotheses, the fictions, the good stupid 
will to " belief," and the lack of distrust and patience 
are first developed — our senses learn late, and 
never learn completely, to be subtle, reliable, and 
cautious organs of knowledge. Our eyes find it 
easier on a given occasion to produce a picture 
already often produced, than to seize upon the 
divergence and novelty of an impression : the latter 
requires more force, more " morality." It is difficult 
and painful for the ear to listen to anything new ; 
we hear strange music badly. When we hear 
another language spoken, we involuntarily attempt 
to form the sounds into words with which we are 
more familiar and conversant — it was thus, for 
example, that the Germans modified the spoken 
word arcubalista into armbrust (cross-bow). Our 
senses are also hostile and averse to the new ; and 
generally, even in the "simplest" processes of sensa- 
tion, the emotions dominate — such as fear, love, 
hatred, and the passive emotion of indolence. — 
As little as a reader nowadays reads all the single 
words (not to speak of syllables) of a page — he 
rather takes about five out of every twenty words 
at random, and " guesses " the probably appropriate 
sense to them — ^just as little do we see a tree 
correctly and completely in respect to its leaves, 
branches, colour, and shape ; we find it so much 
easier to fancy the chance of a tree. Even in the 
midst of the most remarkable experiences, we still 
do just the same ; we fabricate the greater part of 
the experience, and can hardly be made to con- 
template any event, except as " inventors " thereof. 

H 



114 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

All this goes to prove that from our fundamental 
nature and from remote ages we have been — ac- 
customed to lying. Or, to express it more politely 
and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly — one 
is much more of an artist than one is aware of. — In 
an animated conversation, I often see the face of 
the person with whom I am speaking so clearly and 
sharply defined before me, according to the thought 
he expresses, or which I believe to be evoked in his 
mind, that the degree of distinctness far exceeds 
the strength of my visual faculty — the delicacy of 
the play of the muscles and of the expression of 
the eyes must therefore be imagined by me. Pro- 
bably the person put on quite a different expression, 
or none at all. 

193. 

Quidquidluce fuit^ tenehjns agit : but also contrari- 
wise. What we experience in dreams, provided we 
experience it often, pertains at last just as much to 
the general belongings of our soul as anything 
" actually " experienced ; by virtue thereof we are 
richer or poorer, we have a requirement more or 
less, and finally, in broad daylight, and even in the 
brightest moments of our waking life, we are ruled 
to some extent by the nature of our dreams. Sup- 
posing that some one has often flown in his dreams, 
and that at last, as soon as he dreams, he is con- 
scious of the power and art of flying as his privilege 
and his peculiarly enviable happiness ; such a per- 
son, who believes that on the slightest impulse, he 
can actualise all sorts of curves and angles, who 
knows the sensation of a certain divine levity, an 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. II5 

"upwards" without effort or constraint, a "down- 
wards " without descending or lowering — without 
trouble 1 — how could the man with such dream- 
experiences and dream-habits fail to find " happi- 
ness " differently coloured and defined, even in his 
waking hours ! How could he fail — to long differ- 
ently for happiness ? " Flight," such as is described 
by poets, must, when compared with his own 
" flying," be far too earthly, muscular, violent, far 
too " troublesome " for him. 

194. 
The difference among men does not manifest 
itself only in the difference of their lists of desir- 
able things — in their regarding different good things 
as worth striving for, and being disagreed as to the 
greater or less value, the order of rank, of the com- 
monly recognised desirable things : — it manifests 
itself much more in what they regard as actually 
having and possessing a desirable thing. As regards 
a woman, for instance, the control over her body 
and her sexual gratification serves as an amply 
sufficient sign of ownership and possession to the 
more modest man ; another with a more suspicious 
and ambitious thirst for possession, sees the " ques- 
tionableness," the mere apparentness of such owner- 
ship, and wishes to have finer tests in order to know 
especially whether the woman not only gives herself 
to him, but also gives up for his sake what she has 
or would like to have — only then does he look upon 
her as " possessed." A third, however, has not even 
here got to the limit of his distrust and his desire 
for possession : he asks himself whether the woman, 



Il6 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

when she gives up everything for him, does not 
perhaps do so for a phantom of him ; he wishes 
just to be thoroughly, indeed, profoundly well 
known, in order to be loved at all he ventures to 
let himself be found out. Only then does he feel 
the beloved one fully in his possession, when she no 
longer deceives herself about him, when she loves 
him just as much for the sake of his devilry and 
concealed insatiability, as for his goodness, patience, 
and spirituality. One man would like to possess a 
nation, and he finds all the higher arts of Cagliostro 
and Catalina suitable for his purpose. Another, 
with a more refined thirst for possession, says to 
himself: " One may not deceive where one desires 
to possess'' — he is irritated and impatient at the 
idea that a mask of him should rule in the hearts of 
the people : " I must, therefore, make myself known, 
and first of all learn to know myself!" Amongst 
helpful and charitable people, one almost always 
finds the awkward craftiness which first gets up 
suitably him who has to be helped, as though, for 
instance, he should " merit " help, seek just their 
help, and would show himself deeply grateful, 
attached, and subservient to them for all help. 
With these conceits, they take control of the needy 
as a property, just as in general they are charitable 
and helpful out of a desire for property. One finds 
them jealous when they are crossed or forestalled 
in their charity. Parents involuntarily make some- 
thing like themselves out of their children — they 
call that "education"; no mother doubts at the 
bottom of her heart that the child she has born 
is thereby her property, no father hesitates about 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. II7 

his right to subject it to his own ideas and notions 
of worth. Indeed, in former times fathers deemed 
it right to use their discretion concerning the 
life or death of the newly born (as amongst the 
ancient Germans). And like the father, so also do 
the teacher, the class, the priest, and the prince 
still see in every new individual an unobjectionable 
opportunity for a new possession. The consequence 
is. . . • 

195. 
' The Jews — a people " born for slavery," as Tacitus 
and the whole ancient world say of them ; " the 
chosen people among the nations," as they them- 
selves say and believe — the Jews performed the* 
miracle of the inversion of valuations, by means of 
which life on earth obtained a new and dangerous 
charm for a couple of millenniums. Their prophets 
fused into one the expressions " rich," " godless," 
" wicked," " violent," " sensual," and for the first 
time coined the word " world " as a term of re- 
proach. In this inversion of valuations (in which is 
also included the use of the word ** poor " as synony- 
mous with " saint " and " friend ") the significance of 
the Jewish people is to be found ; it is with them 
that the slave-insurrection in morals commences. 



196. 

It is to be inferred that there are countless dark 
bodies near the sun — such as we shall never see. 
Amongst ourselves, this is an allegory; and the 
psychologist of morals reads the whole star-writing 



Il8 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

merely as an allegorical and symbolic language in 
which much may be unexpressed. 

197. 
The beast of prey and the man of prey (for in- 
stance, Caesar Borgia) are fundamentally misunder- 
stood, "nature" is misunderstood, so long as one 
seeks a " morbidness " in the constitution of these 
healthiest of all tropical monsters and growths, or 
even an innate " hell " in them — as almost all 
moralists have done hitherto. Does it not seem 
that there is a hatred of the virgin forest and of the 
tropics among moralists ? And that the " tropical 
man " must be discredited at all costs, whether as 
disease and deterioration of mankind, or as his own 
hell and self-torture ? And why ? In favour of the 
" temperate zones " ? In favour of the temperate 
men? The "moral"? The mediocre? — This for 
the chapter : " Morals as Timidity." 

198. 
All the systems of morals which address them- 
selves to individuals with a view to their " happi- 
ness," as it is called — what else are they but sug- 
gestions for behaviour adapted to the degree of 
danger from themselves in which the individuals 
live ; recipes for their passions, their good and bad 
propensities, in so far as such have the Will to Power 
and would like to play the master ; small and great 
expediencies and elaborations, permeated with the 
musty odour of old family medicines and old-wife 
wisdom ; all of them grotesque and absurd in their 
form — because they address themselves to "all," 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. II9 

because they generalise where generalisation is not 
authorised ; all of them speaking unconditionally, 
and taking themselves unconditionally ; all of them 
flavoured not merely with one grain of salt, but 
rather endurable only, and sometimes even seduc- 
tive, when they are over-spiced and begin to smell 
dangerously, especially of " the other world " : — that 
is all of little value when estimated intellectually, 
and is far from being "science," much less "wisdom"; 
but, repeated once more, and three times repeated, 
it is expediency, expediency, expediency, mixed 
with stupidity, stupidity, stupidity — whether it be 
the indifference and statuesque coldness towards 
the heated folly of the emotions, which the Stoics 
advised and fostered ; or the no-more-laughing and 
no-more-weeping of Spinoza, the destruction of the 
emotions by their analysis and vivisection, which he 
recommended so naively ; or the lowering of the 
emotions to an innocent mean at which they may 
be satisfied, the Aristotelianism of morals ; or even 
morality as the enjoyment of the emotions in a 
voluntary attenuation and spiritualisation by the 
symbolism of art, perhaps as music, or as love of 
God, and of mankind for God's sake — for in religion 
the passions are once more enfranchised, provided 
that . . . ; or, finally, even the complaisant and 
wanton surrender to the emotions, as has been 
taught by Hafis and Goethe, the bold letting-go of 
the reins, the spiritual and corporeal licentia morum 
in the exceptional cases of wise old codgers and 
drunkards, with whom it "no longer has much 
danger.'* — This also for the chapter : " Morals as 
Timidity/' 



120 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

199. 

Inasmuch as in all ages, as long as mankind has 
existed, there have also been human herds (family 
alliances, communities, tribes, peoples, states, 
churches), and always a great number who obey 
in proportion to the small number who command 
— in view, therefore, of the fact that obedience has 
been most practised and fostered among mankind 
hitherto, one may reasonably suppose that, generally 
speaking, the need thereof is now innate in every 
one, as a kind oi formal conscience which gives the 
command : " Thou shalt unconditionally do some- 
thing, unconditionally refrain from something " ; in 
short, "Thou shalt*' This need tries to satisfy 
itself and to fill its form with a content ; according 
to its strength, impatience, and eagerness, it thereby 
seizes as an omnivorous appetite with little selection, 
and accepts whatever is shouted into its ear by 
all sorts of commanders — parents, teachers, laws, 
class prejudices, or public opinion. The extraor- 
dinary limitation of human development, the hesi- 
tation, protractedness, frequent retrogression, and 
turning thereof, is attributable to the fact that the 
herd-instinct of obedience is transmitted best, and 
at the cost of the art of command. If one imagine 
this instinct increasing to its greatest extent, com- 
manders and independent individuals will finally 
be lacking altogether ; or they will suffer inwardly 
from a bad conscience, and will have to impose a 
deception on themselves in the first place in order 
to be able to command : just as if they also were 
only obeying. This condition of things actually 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. 121 

exists in Europe at present — I call it the moral 
hypocrisy of the commanding class. They know 
no other way of protecting themselves from their 
bad conscience than by playing the role of executors 
of older and higher orders (of predecessors, of the 
constitution, of justice, of the law, or of God him- 
self), or they even justify themselves by maxims 
from the current opinions of the herd, as "first 
servants of their people," or " instruments of the 
public weal." On the other hand, the gregarious 
European man nowadays assumes an air as if he 
were the only kind of man that is allowable ; he 
glorifies his qualities, such as public spirit, kind- 
ness, deference, industry, temperance, modesty, 
indulgence, sympathy, by virtue of which he is 
gentle, endurable, and useful to the herd, as the 
peculiarly human virtues. In cases, however, where 
it is believed that the leader and bell-wether cannot 
be dispensed with, attempt after attempt is made 
nowadays to replace commanders by the sum- 
ming together of clever gregarious men : all repre- 
sentative constitutions, for example, are of this 
origin. In spite of all, what a blessing, what a 
deliverance from a weight becoming unendurable, 
is the appearance of an absolute ruler for these 
gregarious Europeans — of this fact the effect of the 
appearance of Napoleon was the last great proof: 
the history of the influence of Napoleon is almost 
the history of the higher happiness to which the 
entire century has attained in its worthiest indi- 
viduals and periods. 



122 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

200. 

The man of an age of dissolution which mixes 
the races with one another, who has the inheritance 
of a diversified descent in his body — that is to say, 
contrary, and often not only contrary, instincts and 
standards of value, which struggle with one another 
and are seldom at peace — such a man of late 
culture and broken lights, will, on an average, be 
a weak man. His fundamental desire is that the 
war which is in him should come to an end ; 
happiness appears to him in the character of a 
soothing medicine and mode of thought (for 
instance. Epicurean or Christian), as above all 
things the happiness of repose, of undisturbedness, 
of repletion, of final unity — as the "Sabbath of 
Sabbaths," to use the expression of the holy 
rhetorician, St Augustine, who was himself such 
a man. — Should, however, the contrariety and con- 
flict in such natures operate as an additional incen- 
tive and stimulus to life — and if, on the other hand, 
in addition to their powerful and irreconcilable 
instincts, they have also inherited and indoctrin- 
ated into them a proper mastery and subtlety for 
carrying on the conflict with themselves (that is to 
say, the faculty of self-control and self-deception), 
there then arise those marvellously incompre- 
hensible, and inexplicable beings, those enigmatical 
men, predestined for conquering and circumventing 
others, the finest examples of which are Alcibiades 
and Caesar (with whom I should like to associate 
the first of Europeans according to my taste, the 
Hohenstaufen, Frederick the Second), and amongst 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. 1 23 

artists, perhaps Lionardo da Vinci. They appear 
precisely in the same periods when that weaker 
type, with its longing for repose, comes to the 
front ; the two types are complementary to each 
other, and spring from the same causes. 

201. 

As long as the utility which determines moral 
estimates is only gregarious utility, as long as the 
preservation of the community is only kept in view, 
and the immoral is sought precisely and exclusively 
in what seems dangerous to the maintenance of 
the community, there can be no " morality of love 
to one's neighbour." Granted even that there is 
already a little constant exercise of consideration, 
sympathy, fairness, gentleness, and mutual assist- 
ance, granted that even in this condition of society 
all those instincts are already active which are 
latterly distinguished by honourable names as 
" virtues," and eventually almost coincide with the 
conception " morality " : in that period they do not 
as yet belong to the domain of moral valuations — 
they are still ultra-moral. A sympathetic action, 
for instance, is neither called good nor bad, moral 
nor imm.oral, in the best period of the Romans ; 
and should it be praised, a sort of resentful disdain 
is compatible with this praise, even at the best, 
directly the sympathetic action is compared with 
one which contributes to the welfare of the whole, 
to the res publica. After all, " love to our neighbour " 
is always a secondary matter, partly conventional 
and arbitrarily manifest in relation to our fear of 
our neighbour. After the fabric of society seems 



124 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

on the whole established and secured against 
external dangers, it is this fear of our neighbour 
which again creates new perspectives of moral valua- 
tion. Certain strong and dangerous instincts, such 
as the love of enterprise, foolhardiness, revengeful- 
ness, astuteness, rapacity, and love of power, which 
up till then had not only to be honoured from the 
point of view of general utility — under other names, 
of course, than those here given — but had to be 
fostered and cultivated (because they were per- 
petually required in the common danger against 
the common enemies), are now felt in their danger- 
ousness to be doubly strong — when the outlets for 
them are lacking — and are gradually branded as 
immoral and given over to calumny. The contrary 
instincts and inclinations now attain to moral 
honour; the gregarious instinct gradually draws 
its conclusions. How much or how little danger- 
ousness to the community or to equality is con- 
tained in an opinion, a condition, an emotion, a 
disposition, or an endowment — that is now the 
moral perspective ; here again fear is the mother 
of morals. It is by the loftiest and strongest 
instincts, when they break out passionately and 
carry the individual far above and beyond the 
average, and the low level of the gregarious 
conscience, that the self-reliance of the community 
is destroyed ; its belief in itself, its backbone, as it 
were, breaks ; consequently these very instincts 
will be most branded and defamed. The lofty 
independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, 
and even the cogent reason, are felt to be dangers ; 
everything that elevates the individual above the 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. I25 

herd, and is a source of fear to the neighbour, is 
henceforth called evil ; the tolerant, unassuming, 
self-adapting, self-equalising disposition, the medi- 
ocrity of desires, attains to moral distinction and 
honour. Finally, under very peaceful circum- 
stances, there is always less opportunity and 
necessity for training the feelings to severity and 
rigour ; and now every form of severity, even in 
justice, begins to disturb the conscience ; a lofty 
and rigorous nobleness and self- responsibility 
almost offends, and awakens distrust, " the lamb," 
and still more "the sheep," wins respect. There 
is a point of diseased mellowness and effeminacy 
in the history of society, at which society itself 
takes the part of him who injures it, the part of 
the criminal, and does so, in fact, seriously and 
honestly. To punish, appears to it to be somehow 
unfair — it is certain that the idea of " punishment " 
and ** the obligation to punish " are then painful 
and alarming to people. " Is it not sufficient if the 
criminal be rendered harmless ? Why should we 
still punish ? Punishment itself is terrible ! " — with 
these questions gregarious morality, the morality 
of fear, draws its ultimate conclusion. If one 
could at all do away with danger, the cause of fear, 
one would have done away with this morality at 
the same time, it would no longer be necessary, it 
would not consider itself any longer necessary ! — 
Whoever examines the conscience of the present- 
day European, will always elicit the same impera- 
tive from its thousand moral folds and hidden 
recesses, the imperative of the timidity of the herd : 
"we wish that some time or other there may be 



126 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

nothing rnore to fear ! " Some time or other — the 
will and the way thereto is nowadays called 
"progress" all over Europe. 



202. 

Let us at once say again what we have already said 
a hundred times, for people's ears nowadays are un- 
willing to hear such truths — our truths. We know 
well enough how offensively it sounds when any one 
plainly, and without metaphor, counts man amongst 
the animals ; but it will be accounted to us almost 
a crime^ that it is precisely in respect to men of 
"modern ideas" that we have constantly applied 
the terms "herd," "herd-instincts," and such like 
expressions. What avail is it? We cannot do 
otherwise, for it is precisely here that our new in- 
sight is. We have found that in all the principal 
moral judgments Europe has become unanimous, 
including likewise the countries where European 
influence prevails : in Europe people evidently know 
what Socrates thought he did not know, and what 
the famous serpent of old once promised to teach 
— they " know " to-day what is good and evil. It 
must then sound hard and be distasteful to the ear^ 
when we always insist that that which here thinks it 
knows, that which here glorifies itself with praise 
and blame, and calls itself good, is the instinct of 
the herding human animal : the instinct which has 
come and is ever coming more and more to the 
front, to preponderance and supremacy over other 
instincts, according to the increasing physiological 
approximation and resemblance of which it is the 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. 1 27 

symptom. Mo7'ality in Europe at present is herding- 
animal "^norality ; and therefore, as we understand 
the matter, only one kind of human morality, 
beside which, before which, and after which many 
other moralities, and above all higher moralities, 
are or should be possible. Against such a " possi- 
bility," against such a " should be," however, this 
morality defends itself with all its strength ; it says 
obstinately and inexorably : " I am morality itself 
and nothing else is morality ! " — indeed, with the 
help of a religion which has humoured and flattered 
the sublimest desires of the herding-animal, things 
have reached such a point that we always find a 
more visible expression of this morality even in 
political and social arrangements : the democratic 
movement is the inheritance of the Christian move- 
ment. That its tempOy however, is much too slow 
and sleepy for the more impatient ones, for those 
who are sick and distracted by the herding-instinct, 
is indicated by the increasingly furious howling, 
and always less disguised teeth-gnashing of the 
anarchist dogs, who are now roving through the 
highways of European culture, apparently in 
opposition to the peacefully industrious democrats 
and Revolution-ideologues, and still more so to the 
awkward philosophasters and fraternity-visionaries 
who call themselves Socialists and want a " free 
society " ; but in reality at one with them all in 
their thorough and instinctive hostility to every 
form of society other than that of the autonomous 
herd (to the extent even of repudiating the notions 
** master " and " servant " — ni dieu ni maitre^ says a 
socialist formula) ; at one in their tenacious oppo- 



128 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

sition to every special claim, every special right 
and privilege (this means ultimately opposition to 
every right, for when all are equal, no one needs 
" rights '' any longer) ; at one in their distrust of 
punitive justice (as though it were a violation of 
the weak, a wrong to the necessary consequences of 
all former society) ; but equally at one in their 
religion of sympathy, in their compassion for all 
that feels, lives, and sufifers (down to the very 
animals, up even to " God " — the extravagance of 
" sympathy for God " belongs to a democratic age) ; 
altogether at one in the cry and impatience of their 
sympathy, in their deadly hatred of suffering gener- 
ally, in their almost feminine incapacity for witness- 
ing it or allowing it ; at one in their involuntary 
beglooming and besoftening, under the spell of 
which Europe seems to be threatened with a new 
Buddhism ; at one in their belief in the morality of 
mutual sympathy, as though it were morality in 
itself, the climax, the attained climax of mankind, 
the sole hope of the future, the consolation of the 
present, the great discharge from all the obliga- 
tions of the past ; altogether at one in their belief 
in the community as the deliverer^ in the herd, and 
therefore in " themselves." 



203. 

' We, who hold a different belief — we, who regard 
the democratic movement, not only as a degenerat- 
ing form of political organisation, but as equiva- 
lent to a degenerating, a waning type of man, as 
involving his mediocrising and depreciation : where 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. 1 29 

have we to fix our hopes ? In new philosophers — 
there is no other alternative : in minds strong and 
original enough to initiate opposite estimates of 
value, to transvalue and invert " eternal valua- 
tions"; in forerunners, in men of the future, who in 
the present shall fix the constraints and fasten the 
knots which will compel millenniums to take new 
paths. To teach man the future of humanity as 
his will^ as depending on human will, and to make 
preparation for vast hazardous enterprises and col- 
lective attempts in rearing and educating, in order 
thereby to put an end to the frightful rule of folly 
and chance which has hitherto gone by the name 
of " history " (the folly of the " greatest number " 
is only its last form) — for that purpose a new 
type of philosophers and commanders will some 
time or other be needed, at the very idea of 
which everything that has existed in the way of 
occult, terrible, and benevolent beings might look 
pale and dwarfed. The image of such leaders 
hovers before our eyes : — is it lawful for me to 
say it aloud, ye free spirits ? The conditions which 
one would partly have to create and partly utilise 
for their genesis ; the presumptive methods and 
tests by virtue of which a soul should grow up 
to such an elevation and power as to feel a con- 
straint to these tasks ; a transvaluation of values, 
under the new pressure and hammer of which a 
conscience should be steeled and a heart trans- 
formed into brass, so as to bear the weight of such 
responsibility ; and on the other hand the necessity 
for such leaders, the dreadful danger that they 
might be lacking, or miscarry and degenerate: — 

I 



130 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

these are our real anxieties and glooms, ye know it 
well, ye free spirits ! these are the heavy distant 
thoughts and storms which sweep across the heaven 
of our life. There are few pains so grievous as to 
have seen, divined, or experienced how an excep- 
tional man has missed his way and deteriorated ; 
but he who has the rare eye for the universal 
danger of " man '' himself deteriorating^ he who like 
us has recognised the extraordinary fortuitousness 
which has hitherto played its game in respect to 
the future of mankind — ^a game in which neither 
the hand, nor even a " finger of God " has partici- 
pated ! — he who divines the fate that is hidden 
under the idiotic unwariness and blind confidence 
of " modern ideas," and still more under the whole 
of Christo-European morality — suffers from an 
anguish with which no other is to be compared: 
he sees at a glance all that could still be made out 
of 7nan through a favourable accumulation and 
augmentation of human powers and arrangements ; 
he knows with all the knowledge of his conviction 
how unexhausted man still is for the greatest possi- 
bilities, and how often in the past the type man 
has stood in presence of mysterious decisions 
and new paths : — he knows still better from his 
painfulest recollections on what wretched obstacles 
promising developments of the highest rank have 
hitherto usually gone to pieces, broken down, sunk, 
and become contemptible. The universal degener- 
acy of mankind to the level of the " man of the 
future" — as idealised by the socialistic fools and 
shallow - pates — this degeneracy and dwarfing of 
man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they 



THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS. 131 

call it, to a man of " free society "), this brutalising 
of man into a pigmy with equal rights and claims, 
is undoubtedly possible ! He who has thought out 
this possibility to its ultimate conclusion knows 
another loathing unknown to the rest of mankind — 
and perhaps also a new mission I 



SIXTH CHAPTER. 
-WE SCHOLARS. 

204. 

At the risk that moralising may also reveal itself 
here as that which it has always been — namely, 
resolutely montrer ses plates^ according to Balzac — 
I would venture to protest against an improper and 
injurious alteration of rank, which quite unnoticed, 
and as if with the best conscience, threatens nowa- 
days to establish itself in the relations of science 
and philosophy. I mean to say that one must have 
the right out of one's own experience — experience, 
as it seems to me, always implies unfortunate ex- 
perience? — to treat of such an important question of 
rank, so as not to speak of colour like the blind, or 
against science like women and artists (" Ah ! this 
dreadful science ! " sigh their instinct and their 
shame, " it always finds things out ! "). The declara- 
tion of independence of the scientific man, his 
emancipation from pliilosophy, is one of the subtler 
after-effects of democratic organisation and dis- 
organisation : the self-glorification and self-con- 
ceitedness of the learned man is now everywhere in 
full bloom, and in its best springtime — which does 
not mean to imply that in this case self-praise 
smells sweetly. Here also the instinct of the popu- 



134 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

lace cries, " Freedom from all masters ! " and after 
science has, with the happiest results, resisted 
theology, whose " handmaid " it had been too long, 
it now proposes in its wantonness and indiscretion 
to lay down laws for philosophy, and in its turn to 
play the " master" — what am I saying ! to play the 
philosopher on its own account. My memory — the 
memory of a scientific man, if you please ! — teems 
with the naiVetes of insolence which I have heard 
about philosophy and philosophers from young 
naturalists and old physicians (not to mention the 
most cultured and most conceited of all learned 
men, the philologists and schoolmasters, who are 
both the one and the other by profession). On one 
occasion it was the specialist and the Jack Horner 
who instinctively stood on the defensive against all 
synthetic tasks and capabilities ; at another time it 
was the industrious worker who had got a scent of 
otiunt and refined luxuriousness in the internal 
economy of the philosopher, and felt himself 
aggrieved and belittled thereby. On another occa- 
sion it was the colour-blindness of the utilitarian, 
who sees nothing in philosophy but a series of 
refuted systems, and an extravagant expenditure 
which " does nobody any good." At another time 
the fear of disguised mysticism and of the boundary- 
adjustment of knowledge became conspicuous, at 
another time the disregard of individual philoso- 
phers, which had involuntarily extended to disre- 
gard of philosophy generally. In fine, I found most 
frequently, behind the proud disdain of philosophy 
in young scholars, the evil after-effect of some parti- 
cular philosopher, to whom on the whole obedience 



WE SCHOLARS. 1 35 

had been foresworn, without, however, the spell of 
his scornful estimates of other philosophers having 
been got rid of — the result being a general ill-will 
to all philosophy. (Such seems to me, for instance, 
the after-effect of Schopenhauer on the most modern 
Germany : by his unintelligent rage against Hegel, 
he has succeeded in severing the whole of the last 
generation of Germans from its connection with 
German culture, which culture, all things considered, 
has been an elevation and a divining refinement of 
the historical sense ; but precisely at this point 
Schopenhauer himself was poor, irreceptive, and 
un-German to the extent of ingeniousness.) On the 
whole, speaking generally, it may just have been the 
humanness, all-too-humanness of the modern philo- 
sophers themselves, in short, their contemptible- 
ness, which has injured most radically the reverence 
for philosophy and opened the doors to the instinct 
of the populace. Let it but be acknowledged to 
what an extent our modern world diverges from 
the whole style of the world of Heraclites, Plato, 
Empedocles, and whatever else all the royal and 
magnificent anchorites of the spirit were called ; 
and with what justice an honest man of science 
may feel himself of a better family and origin, in 
view of such representatives of philosophy, who, 
owing to the fashion of the present day, are just as 
much aloft as they are down below — in Germany, 
for instance, the two lions of Berlin, the anarchist 
Eugen Diihring and the amalgamist Eduard von 
Hartmann. It is especially the sight of those 
hotch-potch philosophers, who call themselves 
"realists," or " positivists," which is calculated to 



136 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

implant a dangerous distrust in the soul of a young 
and ambitious scholar : those philosophers, at the 
best, are themselves but scholars and specialists, 
that is very evident! — all of them are persons 
who have been vanquished and brought back again 
under the dominion of science, who at one time or 
another claimed more from themselves, without 
having a right to the " more " and its responsibility 
— and who now, creditably, rancorously and vindic- 
tively, represent in word and deed, disbelief in the 
master-task and supremacy of philosophy. After 
all, how could it be otherwise ? Science flourishes 
nowadays and has the good conscience clearly 
visible on its countenance ; while that to which the 
entire modern philosophy has gradually sunk, the 
remnant of philosophy of the present day, excites 
distrust and displeasure, if not scorn and pity. 
Philosophy reduced to a " theory of knowledge," no 
more in fact than a diffident science of epochs and 
doctrine of forbearance: a philosophy that never 
even gets beyond the threshold, and rigorously 
denies itself the right to enter — that is philosophy 
in its last throes, an end, an agony, something that 
awakens pity. How could such a philosophy — 
rule t 

205. 
The dangers that beset the evolution of the philo- 
sopher are, in fact, so manifold nowadays, that one 
might doubt whether this fruit could still come to 
maturity. The extent and towering structure of 
the sciences have increased enormously, and there- 
with also the probability that the philosopher will 



WE SCHOLARS. 1 37 

grow tired even as a learner, or will attach himself 
somewhere and " specialise " : so that he will no 
longer attain to his elevation, that is to say, to his 
superspection, his circumspection, and his despectton. 
Or he gets aloft too late, when the best of his 
maturity and strength is past ; or when he is im- 
paired, coarsened, and deteriorated, so that his view, 
his general estimate of things, is no longer of much 
importance. It is perhaps just the refinement of 
his intellectual conscience that makes him hesitate 
and linger on the way ; he dreads the temptation 
to become a dilettante, a millepede, a milleantenna ; 
he knows too well that as a discerner, one who has 
lost his self-respect no longer commands, no longer 
leads; unless he should aspire to become a great 
play-actor, a philosophical Cagliostro and spiritual 
rat-catcher — in short, a misleader. This is in the 
last instance a question of taste, if it has not really 
been a question of conscience. To double once 
more the philosopher's difficulties, there is also the 
fact that he demands from himself a verdict, a Yea 
or Nay, not concerning science, but concerning life 
and the worth of life — he learns unwillingly to 
believe that it is his right and even his duty to 
obtain this verdict, and he has to seek his way to 
the right and the belief only through the most ex- 
tensive (perhaps disturbing and destroying) ex- 
periences; often hesitating, doubting, and dumb- 
founded. In fact, the philosopher has long been 
mistaken and confused by the multitude, either 
with the scientific man and ideal scholar, or with 
the religiously elevated, desensualised, desecularised 
visionary and God-intoxicated man ; and even yet 



138 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

when one hears anybody praised, because he lives 
"wisely," or "as a philosopher," it hardly means 
anything more than " prudently and apart" Wis- 
dom : that seems to the populace to be a kind of 
flight, a means and artifice for withdrawing success- 
fully from a bad game ; but the genuine philosopher 
— does it not seem so to us^ my friends? — lives 
" unphilosophically " and " unwisely," above all, 
imprudently^ and feels the obligation and burden of 
a hundred attempts and temptations of life — he 
risks ^////j"^^ constantly, he plays the bad game. 

206. 
In relation to the genius, that is to say, a being 
who either engenders or produces — both words under- 
stood in their fullest sense — the man of learning, the 
scientific average man, has always something of the 
old maid about him ; for, like her, he is not con- 
versant with the two principal functions of man. 
To both, of course, to the scholar and to the old 
maid, one concedes respectability, as if by way of 
indemnification — in these cases one emphasises the 
respectability — and yet, in the compulsion of this 
concession, one has the same admixture of vexation. 
Let us examine more closely : what is the scientific 
man ? Firstly, a commonplace type of man, with 
commonplace virtues : that is to say, a non-ruling, 
non-authoritative, and non-self-sufficient type of 
man ; he possesses industry, patient adaptableness to 
rank and file, equability and moderation in capacity 
and requirement ; he has the instinct for people like 
himself, and for that which they require — for 
instance : the portion of independence and green 



WE SCHOLARS. 1 39 

meadow without which there is no rest from labour, 
the claim to honour and consideration (which first 
and foremost presupposes recognition and recognisa- 
bility), the sunshine of a good name, the perpetual 
ratification of his value and usefulness, with which 
the inward distrust which lies at the bottom of the 
heart of all dependent men and gregarious animals, 
has again and again to be overcome. The learned 
man, as is appropriate, has also maladies and 
faults of an ignoble kind : he is full of petty envy, 
and has a lynx-eye for the weak points in those 
natures to whose elevations he cannot attain. He 
is confiding, yet only as one who lets himself go, 
but does not flow; and precisely before the man of 
the great current he stands all the colder and more 
reserved — his eye is then like a smooth and irre- 
sponsive lake, which is no longer moved by rapture 
or sympathy. The worst and most dangerous thing 
of which a scholar is capable results from the instinct 
of mediocrity of his type, from the Jesuitism of 
mediocrity, which labours instinctively for the 
destruction of the exceptional man, and endeavours 
to break — or still better, to relax — every bent bow. 
To relax, of course, with consideration, and naturally 
with an indulgent hand — to relax with confiding 
sympathy : that is the real art of Jesuitism, which 
has always understood how to introduce itself as 
the religion of sympathy. 

207. 
However gratefully one may welcome the objective 
spirit — and who has not been sick to death of all 
subjectivity and its confounded ipsissimosity ! — in 



I40 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

the end, however, one must learn caution even with 
regard to one's gratitude, and put a stop to the 
exaggeration with which the unselfing and de- 
personaHsing of the spirit has recently been cele- 
brated, as if it were the goal in itself, as if it were 
salvation and glorification — as is especially ac- 
customed to happen in the pessimist school, which 
has also in its turn good reasons for paying the 
highest honours to " disinterested knowledge." The 
objective man, who no longer curses and scolds like 
the pessimist, the ideal man of learning in whom 
the scientific instinct blossoms forth fully after a 
thousand complete and partial failures, is assuredly 
one of the most costly instruments that exist, but 
his place is in the hand of one who is more power- 
ful. He is only an instrument ; we may say, he is a 
mirror — he is no " purpose in himself." The objec- 
tive man is in truth a mirror : accustomed to pro- 
stration before everything that wants to be known, 
with such desires only as knowing or " reflecting " 
imply — he waits until something comes, and then 
expands himself sensitively, so that even the light 
footsteps and gliding past of spiritual beings may 
not be lost on his surface and film. Whatever 
" personality " he still possesses seems to him 
accidental, arbitrary, or still oftener, disturbing ; so 
much has he come to regard himself as the passage 
and reflection of outside forms and events. He 
calls up the recollection of " himself " with an effort, 
and not infrequently wrongly ; he readily confounds 
himself with other persons, he makes mistakes with 
regard to his own needs, and here only is he un- 
refined and negligent. Perhaps he is troubled about 



WE SCHOLARS. I41 

the health, or the pettiness and confined atmosphere 
of wife and friend, or the lack of companions and 
society— indeed, he sets himself to reflect on his 
suffering, but in vain ! His thoughts already rove 
away to the more general case, and to-morrow he 
knows as little as he knew yesterday how to help 
himself. He does not now take himself seriously 
and devote time to himself: he is serene, not from 
lack of trouble, but from lack of capacity for grasp- 
ing and dealing with his trouble. The habitual 
complaisance with respect to all objects and ex- 
periences, the radiant and impartial hospitality with 
which he receives everything that comes his way, 
his habit of inconsiderate good-nature, of dangerous 
indifference as to Yea and Nay : alas ! there are 
enough of cases in which he has to atone for these 
virtues of his ! — and as man generally, he becomes 
far too easily the caput mortuu7n of such virtues. 
Should one wish love or hatred from him — I mean 
love and hatred as God, woman, and animal under- 
stand them — he will do what he can, and furnish 
what he can. But one must not be surprised if it 
should not be much — if he should show himself just 
at this point to be false, fragile, questionable, and 
deteriorated. His love is constrained, his hatred is 
artificial, and rather un tour deforce, a slight ostenta- 
tion and exaggeration. He is only genuine so far 
as he can be objective ; only in his serene totality 
is he still " nature " and " natural." His mirroring 
and eternally self-polishing soul no longer knows 
how to affirm, no longer how to deny ; he does not 
command ; neither does he destroy. *'/^ ne meprise 
presque rien " — he says, with Leibnitz : let us not 



142 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

overlook nor undervalue the presque ! Neither is 
he a model man ; he does not go in advance of any 
one, nor after either; he places himself genei ally- 
too far off to have any reason for espousing the 
cause of either good or evil. If he has been so 
long confounded with the philosopher^ with the 
Caesarean trainer and dictator of civilisation, he has 
had far too much honour, and what is most essential 
in him has been overlooked — he is an instrument, 
something of a slave, though certainly the sublimest 
sort of slave, but nothing in \i\\xi'^A{— presque rien ! 
The objective man is an instrument, a costly, easily 
injured, easily tarnished, measuring instrument and 
mirroring apparatus, which is to be taken care of 
and respected ; but he is no goal, no outgoing nor 
upgoing, no complementary man in whom the rest 
of existence justifies itself, no termination — and 
still less a commencement, an engendering, or 
primary cause, nothing hardy, powerful, self-centred, 
that wants to be master ; but rather only a soft, 
inflated, delicate, movable potter's-form, that must 
wait for some kind of content and frame to " shape " 
itself thereto — for the most part a man without 
frame and content, a " selfless " man. Consequently, 
also, nothing for women, in parent hesz. 

208. 

When a philosopher nowadays makes known 
that he is not a sceptic — I hope that has been 
gathered from the foregoing description of the 
objective spirit ? — people all hear it impatiently ; 
they regard him on that account with some appre- 
hension, they would like to ask so many, many 



WE SCHOLARS. I43 

questions . . • indeed among timid hearers, of 
whom there are now so many, he is henceforth said 
to be dangerous. With his repudiation of scepti- 
cism, it seems to them as if they heard some evil- 
threatening sound in the distance, as if a new kind 
of explosive were being tried somewhere, a dyna- 
mite of the spirit, perhaps a newly discovered 
Russian nihiline^ a pessimism bonce voluntatis, that 
not only denies, means denial, but — dreadful 
thought ! practises denial. Against this kind of 
" good will " — a will to the veritable, actual nega- 
tion of life — there is, as is generally acknowledged 
nowadays, no better soporific and sedative than 
scepticism, the mild, pleasing, lulling poppy of 
scepticism ; and Hamlet himself is now prescribed 
by the doctors of the day as an antidote to the 
"spirit," and its underground noises. "Are not 
our ears already full of bad sounds?" say the 
sceptics, as lovers of repose, and almost as a kind 
of safety police, " this subterranean Nay is terrible ! 
Be still, ye pessimistic moles ! " The sceptic, in 
effect, that delicate creature, is far too easily 
frightened; his conscience is schooled so as. to 
start at every Nay, and even at every sharp, 
decided Yea, and feels something like a bite thereby. 
Yea ! and Nay ! — they seem to him opposed to 
morality ; he loves, on the contrary, to make a 
festival to his virtue by a noble aloofness, while 
perhaps he says with Montaigne : " What do I 
know ? " Or with Socrates : " I know that I know 
nothing." Or : " Here I do not trust myself, no 
door is open to me." Or : " Even if the door were 
open, why should I enter immediately .>" Or: 



144 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

"What IS the use of any hasty hypotheses? It 
might quite well be in good taste to make no 
hypotheses at all. Are you absolutely obliged to 
straighten at once what is crooked ? to stuff every 
hole with some kind of oakum ? Is there not time 
enough for that ? Has not the time leisure ? Oh, 
ye demons, can ye not at all wait ? The uncertain 
also has its charms, the Sphinx, too, is a Circe, and 
Circe, too, was a philosopher." — Thus does a sceptic 
console himself; and in truth he needs some con- 
solation. For scepticism is the most spiritual 
expression of a certain many-sided physiological 
temperament, which in ordinary language is called 
nervous debility and sickliness ; it arises whenever 
races or classes which have been long separated, 
decisively and suddenly blend with one another. 
In the new generation, which has inherited as it 
were different standards and valuations in its 
blood, everything is disquiet, derangement, doubt, 
and tentative ; the best powers operate restrictively, 
the very virtues prevent each other growing and 
becoming strong, equilibrium, ballast, and perpen- 
dicular stability are lacking in body and soul. 
That, however, which is most diseased and degen- 
erated in such nondescripts is the will ; they are 
no longer familiar with independence of decision, 
or the courageous feeling of pleasure in willing — 
they are doubtful of the "freedom of the will" 
even in their dreams. Our present-day Europe, 
the scene of a senseless, precipitate attempt at a 
radical blending of classes, and consequently of 
races, is therefore sceptical in all its heights and 
depths, sometimes exhibiting the mobile scepti- 



WE SCHOLARS. I45 

cism which springs impatiently and wantonly from 
branch to branch, sometimes with gloomy aspect, 
like a cloud overcharged with interrogative signs — - 
and often sick unto death of its will ! Paralysis of 
will ; where do we not find this cripple sitting 
nowadays ! And yet how bedecked oftentimes ! 
How seductively ornamented ! There are the 
finest gala dresses and disguises for this disease ; 
and that, for instance, most of what places itself 
nowadays in the show-cases as " objectiveness," 
" the scientific spirit," ''H' art pour Tart I' and "pure 
voluntary knowledge," is only decked-out scepti- 
cism and paralysis of will — I am ready to answer 
for this diagnosis of the European disease. — The 
disease of the will is diffused unequally over 
Europe ; it is worst and most varied where civilisa- 
tion has longest prevailed ; it decreases according 
as "the barbarian" still — or again — asserts his 
claims under the loose drapery of Western culture. 
It is therefore in the France of to-day, as can be 
readily disclosed and comprehended, that the will 
IS most infirm ; and France, which has always 
had a masterly aptitude for converting even the 
portentous crises of its spirit into something 
charming and seductive, now manifests emphatic- 
ally its intellectual ascendency over Europe, by 
being the school and exhibition of all the charms 
of scepticism. The power to will and to persist, 
moreover, in a resolution, is already somewhat 
stronger in Germany, and again in the North of 
Germany it is stronger than in Central Germany ; 
it is considerably stronger in England, Spain, and 
Corsica, associated with phlegm in the former and 

K 



146 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

with hard skulls in the latter — not to mention 
Italy, which is too young yet to know what it 
wants, and must first show whether it can exercise 
will ; but it is strongest and most surprising of all 
in that immense middle empire where Europe as it 
were flows back to Asia — namely, in Russia. 
There the power to will has been long stored up 
and accumulated, there the will — uncertain whether 
to be negative or affirmative — waits threateningly to 
be discharged (to borrow their pet phrase from our 
physicists). Perhaps not only Indian wars and 
complications in Asia would be necessary to free 
Europe from its greatest danger, but also internal 
subversion, the shattering of the empire into small 
states, and above all the introduction of parlia- 
mentary imbecility, together with the obligation 
of every one to read his newspaper at breakfast. 
I do not say this as one who desires it ; in my 
heart I should rather prefer the contrary — I mean 
such an increase in the threatening attitude of 
Russia, that Europe would have to make up its 
mind to become equally threatening — namely, to 
acquire one will, by means of a new caste to rule 
over the Continent, a persistent, dreadful will of its 
own, that can set its aims thousands of years ahead ; 
so that the long spun-out comedy of its petty- 
stateism, and its dynastic as well as its democratic 
many-willed-ness, might finally be brought to a 
close. The time for petty politics is past ; the next 
century will bring the struggle for the dominion 
of the world — the compulsion to great politics. 



WE SCHOLARS. I47 

209. 

As to how far the new warlike age on which we 
Europeans have evidently entered may perhaps 
favour the growth of another and stronger kind of 
scepticism, I should like to express myself pre- 
liminarily merely by a parable, which the lovers of 
German history will already understand. That un- 
scrupulous enthusiast for big, handsome grenadiers 
(who, as King of Prussia, brought into being a 
military and sceptical genius — and therewith, in 
reality, the new and now triumphantly emerged 
type of German), the problematic, crazy father of 
Frederick the Great, had on one point the very 
knack and lucky grasp of the genius : he knew 
what was then lacking in Germany, the want of 
which was a hundred times more alarming and 
serious than any lack of culture and social form — his 
ill-will to the young Frederick resulted from the 
anxiety of a profound instinct. Men were lacking; 
and he suspected, to his bitterest regret, that his own 
son was not man enough. There, however, he de- 
ceived himself; butwho wouldnothave deceivedhim- 
self in his place ? He saw his son lapsed to atheism, 
to the esprit^ to the pleasant frivolity of clever 
Frenchmen — he saw in the background the great 
bloodsucker, the spider scepticism ; he suspected 
the incurable wretchedness of a heart no longer 
hard enough either for evil or good, and of a broken 
will that no longer commands, is no longer able to 
command. Meanwhile, however, there grew up in 
his son that new kind of harder and more dangerous 
scepticism — who knows to what extent it was en- 



148 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

couraged just by his father's hatred and the icy 
melancholy of a will condemned to solitude ? — the 
scepticism of daring manliness, which is closely 
related to the genius for war and conquest, and 
made its first entrance into Germany in the person 
of the great Frederick. This scepticism despises 
and nevertheless grasps ; it undermines and takes 
possession ; it does not believe, but it does not 
thereby lose itself; it gives the spirit a dangerous 
liberty, but it keeps strict guard over the heart ; it 
is the German form of scepticism, which, as a con- 
tinued Fredericianism, risen to the highest spiritua- 
lity, has kept Europe for a considerable time under 
the dominion of the German spirit and its critical 
and historical distrust. Owing to the insuperably 
strong and tough masculine character of the great 
German philologists and historical critics (who, 
rightly estimated, were also all of them artists of 
destruction and dissolution), a new conception of 
the German spirit gradually established itself — in 
spite of all Romanticism in music and philosophy — 
in which the leaning towards masculine scepticism 
was decidedly prominent : whether, for instance, as 
fearlessness of gaze, as courage and sternness of the 
dissecting hand, or as resolute will to dangerous 
voyages of discovery, to spiritualised North Pole 
expeditions under barren and dangerous skies. 
There may be good grounds for it when warm- 
blooded and superficial humanitarians cross them- 
selves before this spirit, cet esprit fataliste^ ironique^ 
m^phislophelzquey as Michelet calls it, not without a 
shudder. But if one would realise how characteristic 
is this fear of the " man " in the German spirit which 



WE SCHOLARS. 149 

awakened Europe out of its " dogmatic slumber," 
let us call to mind the former conception which had 
to be overcome by this new one — and that it is not 
so very long ago that a masculinised woman could 
dare, with unbridled presumption, to recommend 
the Germans to the interest of Europe as gentle, 
good-hearted, weak-willed, and poetical fools. 
Finally, let us only understand profoundly enough 
Napoleon's astonishment when he saw Goethe : it 
reveals what had been regarded for centuries as the 
" German spirit." " Voild un homme /" — that was 
as much as to say : " But this is a man I And I 
only expected to see a German ! " 

210. 
Supposing, then, that in the picture of the philo- 
sophers of the future, some trait suggests the 
question whether they must not perhaps be sceptics 
in the last-mentioned sense, something in them 
would only be designated thereby — and not they 
themselves. With equal right they might call 
themselves critics ; and assuredly they will be 
men of experiments. By the name with which I 
ventured to baptize them, I have already expressly 
emphasised their attempting and their love of 
attempting : was this because, as critics in body and 
soul, they will love to make use of experiments in a 
new, and perhaps wider and more dangerous sense ? 
In their passion for knowledge, will they have to go 
further in daring and painful attempts than the sensi- 
tive and pampered taste of a democratic century 
can approve of? — There is no doubt: these coming 
ones will be least able to dispense with the serious 



ISO BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

and not unscrupulous qualities which distinguish 
the critic from the sceptic : I mean the certainty as 
to standards of worth, the conscious employment 
of a unity of method, the wary courage, the standing- 
alone, and the capacity for self-responsibility ; 
indeed, they will avow among themselves a delight 
in denial and dissection, and a certain considerate 
cruelty, which knows how to handle the knife surely 
and deftly, even when the heart bleeds. They will 
be sterner (and perhaps not always towards them- 
selves only) than humane people may desire, they 
will not deal with the " truth " in order that it may 
" please " them, or " elevate " and " inspire " them — 
they will rather have little faith in '^ truth " bringing 
with it such revels for the feelings. They will 
smile, those rigorous spirits, when any one says in 
their presence: "that thought elevates me, why 
should it not be true ?" or: " that work enchants me, 
why should it not be beautiful ?'* or : " that artist en- 
larges me, why should he not be great?" Perhaps 
they will not only have a smile, but a genuine disgust 
for all that is thus rapturous, idealistic, feminine, and 
hermaphroditic ; and if any one could look into their 
inmost heart, he would not easily find therein the 
intention to reconcile '* Christian sentiments " with 
" antique taste," or even with " modern parliamen- 
tarism " (the kind of reconciliation necessarily found 
even amongst philosophers in our very uncertain 
and consequently very conciliatory century). 
Critical discipline, and every habit that conduces 
to purity and rigour in intellectual matters, will not 
only be demanded from themselves by these philo- 
sophers of the future; they may even make a display 



WE SCHOLARS. I51 

thereof as their special adornment — nevertheless 
they will not want to be called critics on that 
account. It will seem to them no small indignity 
to philosophy to have it decreed, as is so welcome 
nowadays, that " philosophy itself is criticism and 
critical science — and nothing else whatever!" 
Though this estimate of philosophy may enjoy the 
approval of all the Positivists of France and Ger- 
many (and possibly it even flattered the heart and 
taste of Kant : let us call to mind the titles of his 
principal works), our new philosophers will say, not- 
withstanding, that critics are instruments of the 
philosopher, and just on that account, as instru- 
ments, they are far from being philosophers them- 
selves ! Even the great Chinaman of Konigsberg 
was only a great critic. 

211. 

I insist upon it that people finally cease con- 
founding philosophical workers, and in general 
scientific men, with philosophers — that precisely 
here one should strictly give " each his own," and 
not give those far too much, these far too little. It 
may be necessary for the education of the real 
philosopher that he himself should have once stood 
upon all those steps upon which his servants, the 
scientific workers of philosophy, remain standing, 
and must remain standing : he himself must perhaps 
have been critic, and dogmatist, and historian, and 
besides, poet, and collector, and traveller, and 
riddle-reader, and moralist, and seer, and "free 
spirit," and almost everything, in order to traverse 
the whole range of human values and estimations, 



152 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

and that he may be able with a variety of eyes and 
consciences to look from a height to any distance, 
from a depth up to any height, from a nook into 
any expanse. But all these are only preliminary 
conditions for his task ; this task itself demands 
something else — it requires him to create values. 
The philosophical workers, after the excellent 
pattern of Kant and Hegel, have to fix and formal- 
ise some great existing body of valuations — that 
is to say, former determinations of value^ creations 
of value, which have become prevalent, and are for 
a time called " truths " — whether in the domain of 
the logical^ the political (moral), or the artistic. It 
is for these investigators to make whatever has 
happened and been esteemed hitherto, conspicuous, 
conceivable, intelligible, and manageable, to shorten 
everything long, even " time " itself, and to subjugate 
the entire past : an immense and wonderful task, 
in the carrying out of which all refined pride, all 
tenacious will, can surely find satisfaction. The 
real philosophers^ however^ are commanders and law- 
givers ; they say : " Thus shall it be ! " They 
determine first the Whither and the Why of man- 
kind, and thereby set aside the previous labour 
of all philosophical workers, and all subjugators of 
the past — they grasp at the future with a creative 
hand, and whatever is and was, becomes for them 
thereby a means, an instrument, and a hammer. 
Their " knowing " is creating^ their creating is a 
law-giving, their will to truth is — Will to Power, — 
Are there at present such philosophers? Have 
there ever been such philosophers? Must there 
not be such philosophers some day ? • • . 



WE SCHOLARS. 1 53 



212. 



It IS always more obvious to me that the philo- 
sopher, as a man indispensable for the morrow and 
the day after the morrow, has ever found himself, 
and has been obliged to find himself, in contradiction 
to the day in which he lives ; his enemy has always 
been the ideal of his day. Hitherto all those 
extraordinary furtherers of humanity whom one 
calls philosophers — who rarely regarded themselves 
as lovers of wisdom, but rather as disagreeable fools 
and dangerous interrogators — have found their 
mission, their hard, involuntary, imperative mission 
(in the end however the greatness of their mission), 
in being the bad conscience of their age. In putting 
the vivisector's knife to the breast of the very virtues 
of their age^ they have betrayed their own secret ; 
it has been for the sake of a new greatness of man, 
a new untrodden path to his aggrandisement. 
They have always disclosed how much hypocrisy, 
indolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how 
much falsehood was concealed under the most 
venerated types of contemporary morality, how 
much virtue was outlived ; they have always said : 
" We must remove hence to where you are least at 
home." In face of a world of "modern ideas," 
which would like to confine every one in a corner, 
in a "specialty," a philosopher, if there could be 
philosophers nowadays, would be compelled to 
place the greatness of man, the conception of 
" greatness," precisely in his comprehensiveness and 
multifariousness, in his all-roundness ; he would 
even determine worth and rank according to the 



154 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

amount and variety of that which a man could bear 
and take upon himself, according to the extent to 
which a man could stretch his responsibility. Nowa- 
days the taste and virtue of the age weaken and 
attenuate the will ; nothing is so adapted to the 
spirit of the age as weakness of will : consequently, 
in the ideal of the philosopher, strength of will, 
sternness and capacity for prolonged resolution, 
must specially be included in the conception of 
" greatness " ; with as good a right as the opposite 
doctrine, with its ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble, 
selfless humanity, was suited to an opposite age — 
such as the sixteenth century, which suffered from 
its accumulated energy of will, and from the wildest 
torrents and floods of selfishness. In the time of 
Socrates, among men only of worn-out instincts, 
old conservative Athenians who let themselves 
go — " for the sake of happiness," as they said ; for 
the sake of pleasure, as their conduct indicated — 
and who had continually on their lips the old 
pompous words to which they had long forfeited 
the right by the life they led, irony was perhaps 
necessary for greatness of soul, the wicked Socratic 
assurance of the old physician and plebeian, who 
cut ruthlessly into his own flesh, as into the flesh 
and heart of the "noble," with a look that said 
plainly enough : " Do not dissemble before me ! 
here — we are equal ! " At present, on the contrary, 
when throughout Europe the herding animal alone 
attains to honours, and dispenses honours, when 
" equality of right " can too readily be transformed 
into equality in wrong : I mean to say into general 
war against everything rare, strange, and privileged, 



WE SCHOLARS. 1 55 

against the higher man, the higher soul, the higher 
duty, the higher responsibility, the creative pleni- 
potence and lordliness — at present it belongs to 
the conception of " greatness " to be noble, to wish 
to be apart, to be capable of being different, to 
stand alone, to have to live by personal initiative ; 
and the philosopher will betray something of his 
own ideal when he asserts : " He shall be the 
greatest who can be the most solitary, the most 
concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond 
good and evil, the master of his virtues, and of 
superabundance of will ; precisely this shall be 
called greatness : as diversified as can be entire, as 
ample as can be full." And to ask once more the 
question: Is gresitness J^osszdle — nowadays? 

213. 

It is difficult to learn what a philosopher is, 
because it cannot be taught : one must " know " it 
by experience — or one should have the pride not 
to know it. The fact that at present people all 
talk of things of which they cannot hdiVQ any experi- 
ence, is true more especially and unfortunately as 
concerns the philosopher and philosophical matters : 
— the very few know them, are permitted to 
know them, and all popular ideas about them are 
false. Thus, for instance, the truly philosophical 
combination of a bold, exuberant spirituality which 
runs at presto pace, and a dialectic rigour and 
necessity which makes no false step, is unknown 
to most thinkers and scholars from their own 
experience, and therefore, should any one speak of 
it in their presence, it is incredible to them. They 



156 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

conceive of every necessity as troublesome, as a 
painful compulsory obedience and state of con- 
straint ; thinking itself is regarded by them as 
something slow and hesitating, almost as a trouble, 
and often enough as " worthy of the sweat of the 
noble" — but not at all as something easy and divine, 
closely related to dancing and exuberance ! " To 
think" and to take a matter "seriously," "ardu- 
ously " — that is one and the same thing to them ; 
such only has been their "experience." — Artists 
have here perhaps a finer intuition ; they who know 
only too well that precisely when they no longer 
do anything " arbitrarily," and everything of neces- 
sity, their feeling of freedom, of subtlety, of power, 
of creatively fixing, disposing, and shaping, reaches 
its climax — in short, that necessity and " freedom 
of will " are then the same thing with them. There 
is, in fine, a gradation of rank in psychical states, 
to which the gradation of rank in the problems 
corresponds ; and the highest problems repel ruth- 
lessly every one who ventures too near them, with- 
out being predestined for their solution by the 
loftiness and power of his spirituality. Of what 
use is it for nimble, everyday intellects, or clumsy, 
honest mechanics and empiricists to press, in their 
plebeian ambition, close to such problems, and as 
it were into this "holy of holies" — as so often 
happens nowadays ! But coarse feet must never 
tread upon such carpets : this is provided for in 
the primary law of things ; the doors remain closed 
to those intruders, though they may dash and 
break their heads thereon ! People have always 
to be born to a high station, or, more definitely, 



WE SCHOLARS. 157 

they have to be bred for it : a person has only a 
right to philosophy — taking the word in its higher 
significance — in virtue of his descent; the ancestors, 
the " blood," decide here also. Many generations 
must have prepared the way for the coming of the 
philosopher ; each of his virtues must have been 
separately acquired, nurtured, transmitted, and 
embodied ; not only the bold, easy, delicate course 
and current of his thoughts, but above all the 
readiness for great responsibilities, the majesty of 
ruling glance and contemning look, the feeling of 
separation from the multitude with their duties and 
virtues, the kindly patronage and defence of what- 
ever is misunderstood and calumniated, be it God 
^ or devil, the delight and practice of supreme justice, 
"the art of commanding, the amplitude of will, the 
lingering eye which rarely admires, rarely looks up, 
rarely loves. , • • 



SEVENTH CHAPTER. 
OUR VIRTUES. 

214. 

Our Virtues? — It is probable that we too have 
still our virtues, although naturally they are not 
those sincere and massive virtues on account of 
which we hold our grandfathers in esteem and also 
at a little distance from us. We Europeans of the 
day after to-morrow, we firstlings of the twentieth 
century — with all our dangerous curiosity, our 
multifariousness and art of disguising, our mellow 
and seemingly sweetened cruelty in sense and 
spirit — we shall presumably, if we should have 
virtues, have those only which have come to agree 
best with our most secret and heartfelt inclinations, 
with our most ardent requirements : well, then, let 
us look for them in our labyrinths ! — where, as we 
know, so many things lose themselves, so many 
things get quite lost ! And is there anything finer 
than to search for one's own virtues? Is it not 
almost to believe in one's own virtues? But this 
" believing in one's own virtues " — is it not practi- 
cally the same as what was formerly called one's 
" good conscience," that long, respectable pigtail of 
an idea, which our grandfathers used to hang behind 



l6o BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

their heads, and often enough also behind their 
understandings ? It seems, therefore, that however 
little we may imagine ourselves to be old-fashioned 
and grandfatherly respectable in other respects, in 
one thing we are nevertheless the worthy grand- 
children of our grandfathers, we last Europeans 
with good consciences : we also still wear their 
pigtail. — Ah ! if you only knew how soon, so very 
soon — it will be different ! 

215. 

As in the stellar firmament there are sometimes 
two suns which determine the path of one planet, 
and in certain cases suns of different colours shine 
around a single planet, now with red light, now 
with green, and then simultaneously illumine and 
flood it with motley colours : so we modern men, 
owing to the complicated mechanism of our " firma- 
ment," are determined by different moralities ; our 
actions shine alternately in different colours, and 
are seldom unequivocal — and there are often cases, 
also, in which our actions are motley-coloured. 

216. 

To love one's enemies ? I think that has been 
well learnt : it takes place thousands of times at 
present on a large and small scale ; indeed, at 
times the higher and sublimer thing takes place : — 
we learn to despise when we love, and precisely 
when we love best ; all of it, however, unconsciously, 
without noise, without ostentation, with the shame 
and secrecy of goodness, which forbids the utter- 



OUR VIRTUES. l6l 

ance of the pompous word and the formula of 
virtue. Morality as attitude — is opposed to our 
taste nowadays. This is also an advance, as it 
was an advance in our fathers that religion as an 
attitude finally became opposed to their taste, 
including the enmity and Voltairean bitterness 
against religion (and all that formerly belonged 
to freethinker-pantomime). It is the music in our 
conscience, the dance in our spirit, to which Puritan 
litanies, moral sermons, and goody-goodness won't 
chime. 

217. 

Let us be careful in dealing with those who 
attach great importance to being credited with 
moral tact and subtlety in moral discernment! 
They never forgive us if they have once made a 
mistake before us (or even with regard to us) — they 
inevitably become our instinctive calumniators and 
detractors, even when they still remain our "friends." 
— Blessed are the forgetful : for they "get the better" 
even of their blunders. 

218. 

The psychologists of France — and where else are 
there still psychologists nowadays? — have never 
yet exhausted their bitter and manifold enjoy- 
ment of the betise bourgeoise^ just as though ... in 
short, they betray something thereby. Flaubert, for 
instance, the honest citizen of Rouen, neither saw, 
heard, nor tasted anything else in the end ; it was 
his mode of self-torment and refined cruelty. As 
this is growing wearisome, I would now recommend 

L 



l62 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

for a change something else for your delight — 
namely, the unconscious astuteness with which 
good, fat, honest mediocrity always behaves to- 
wards loftier spirits and the tasks they have to 
perform, the subtle, barbed, Jesuitical astuteness, 
which is a thousand times subtler than the taste 
and understanding of the middle-class in its best 
moments — subtler even than the understanding of 
its victims : — a repeated proof that " instinct " is 
the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence 
which have hitherto been discovered. In short, 
you psychologists, study the philosophy of the 
" rule " in its struggle with the " exception " : there 
you have a spectacle fit for Gods and godlike 
malignity ! Or, in plainer words, practise vivi- 
section on "good people," on the ^^ homo boncB 
voluntattSy^ . . . on yourselves ! 

219. 

The practice of judging and condemning morally, 
is the favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow 
on those who are less so ; it is also a kind of 
indemnity for them being badly endowed by 
nature ; and finally, it is an opportunity for acquir- 
ing spirit and becoming subtle : — malice spiritualises. 
They are glad in their inmost heart that there is a 
standard according to which those who are over- 
endowed with intellectual goods and privileges, are 
equal to them ; they contend for the " equality of all 
before God," and almost need the belief in God for 
this purpose. It is among them that the most 
powerful antagonists of atheism are found. If any 
one were to say to them : " a lofty spirituality is 



OUR VIRTUES. 163 

beyond all comparison with the honesty and 
respectability of a merely moral man " — it would 
make them furious ; I shall take care not to say 
so. I would rather flatter them with my theory 
that lofty spirituality itself exists only as the 
ultimate product of moral qualities ; that it is a 
synthesis of all qualities attributed to the " merely 
moral " man, after they have been acquired singly 
through long training and practice, perhaps during 
a whole series of generations ; that lofty spirituality 
is precisely the spiritualising of justice, and the 
beneficent severity which knows that it is author- 
ised to maintain gradations of rank in the world, 
even among things — and not only among men. 

220. 

Now that the praise of the " disinterested person " 
is so popular, one must — probably not without 
some danger — get an idea of what people actually 
take an interest in, and what are the things 
generally which fundamentally and profoundly 
concern ordinary men — including the cultured, 
even the learned, and perhaps philosophers also, if 
appearances do not deceive. The fact thereby 
becomes obvious that the greater part of what 
interests and charms higher natures, and more 
refined and fastidious tastes, seems absolutely " un- 
interesting " to the average man : — if, notwithstand- 
ing, he perceive devotion to these interests, he calls 
it desinteressey and wonders how it is possible to 
act "disinterestedly." There have been philo- 
sophers who could give this popular astonishment 
a seductive and mystical, other-world expression 



l64 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

(perhaps because they did not know the higher 
nature by experience ?), instead of stating the naked 
and candidly reasonable truth that " disinterested " 
action is very interesting and " interested " action, 
provided that ..." And love ? "—What ! Even 
an action for love's sake shall be " unegoistic " ? But 
you fools — ! "And the praise of the self-sacrificer ? " 
— But whoever has really offered sacrifice knows 
that he wanted and obtained something for it — 
perhaps something from himself for something from 
self — that he relinquished here in order to have 
more there, perhaps in general to be more, or even 
feel himself " more." But this is a realm of ques- 
tions and answers in which a more fastidious spirit 
does not like to stay : for here truth has to stifle 
her yawns so much when she is obliged to answer. 
And after all, truth is a woman ; one must not use 
force with her, 

221. 

" It sometimes happens," said a moralistic pedant 
and trifle-retailer, " that I honour and respect an 
unselfish man : not, however, because he is unselfish, 
but because I think he has a right to be useful to 
another man at his own expense. In short, the 
question is always who he is, and who the other is. 
For instance, in a person created and destined for 
command, self-denial and modest retirement, instead 
of being virtues would be the waste of virtues : so 
it seems to me. Every system of unegoistic mor- 
ality which takes itself unconditionally and appeals 
to every one, not only sins against good taste, but 
is also an incentive to sins of omission, an additional 



OUR VIRTUES. 165 

seduction under the mask of philanthropy — and 
precisely a seduction and injury to the higher, 
rarer, and more privileged types of men. Moral 
systems must be compelled first of all to bow 
before the gradations of rank; their presumption 
must be driven home to their conscience — until 
they thoroughly understand at last that it is 
immoral to say that " what is right for one is 
proper for another." — So said my moralistic pedant 
and bonhomine. Did he perhaps deserve to be 
laughed at when he thus exhorted systems of 
morals to practise morality ? But one should not 
be too much in the right if one wishes to have the 
laughers on one's own side ; a grain of wrong 
pertains even to good taste. 

222. 

Wherever sympathy (fellow-suffering) is preached 
nowadays — and, if I gather rightly, no other re- 
ligion is any longer preached — let the psycholo- 
gist have his ears open : through all the vanity, 
through all the noise which is natural to these 
preachers (as to all preachers), he will hear a hoarse, 
groaning, genuine note of self-contempt It belongs 
to the overshadowing and uglifying of Europe, 
which has been on the increase for a century (the 
first symptoms of which are already specified 
documentarily in a thoughtful letter of Galiani to 
Madame d'Epinay) — if it is not really the cause 
thereof I The man of "modern ideas," the con- 
ceited ape, is excessively dissatisfied with himself — 
this is perfectly certain. He suffers, and his vanity 
wants him only " to suffer with his fellows." 



1 66 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

223. 

The hybrid European — a tolerably ugly plebeian, 
taken all in all — absolutely requires a costume : 
he needs history as a storeroom of costumes. To 
be sure, he notices that none of the costumes fit 
him properly — he changes and changes. Let us 
look at the nineteenth century with respect to these 
hasty preferences and changes in its masquerades 
of style, and also with respect to its moments of 
desperation on account of "nothing suiting" us. 
It is in vain to get ourselves up as romantic, or 
classical, or Christian, or Florentine, or barocco^ or 
" national," in morihus et artibus : it does not 
" clothe us " ! But the " spirit," especially the 
" historical spirit," profits even by this desperation : 
once and again a new sample of the past or of 
the foreign is tested, put on, taken off, packed up, 
and above all studied — we are the first studious 
age in puncto of " costumes," I mean as concerns 
morals, articles of belief, artistic tastes, and religions ; 
we are prepared as no other age has ever been for 
a carnival in the grand style, for the most spiritual 
festival-laughter and -arrogance, for the transcen- 
dental height of supreme folly and Aristophanic 
ridicule of the world. Perhaps we are still dis- 
covering the domain of our invention just here, the 
domain where even we can still be original, pro- 
bably as parodists of the world's history add as 
God's Merry-Andrews, — perhaps, though nothing 
else of the present have a future, our laughter itself 
may have a future ! 



OUR VIRTUES. 167 

224. 

The historical sense (or the capacity for divining 
quickly the order of rank of the valuations accord- 
ing to which a people, a community, or an indi- 
vidual has lived, the "divining instinct" for the 
relationships of these valuations, for the relation of 
the authority of the valuations to the authority of 
the operating forces), — this historical sense, which 
we Europeans claim as our speciality, has come to 
us in the train of the enchanting and mad semi- 
barbarity into which Europe has been plunged by 
the democratic mingling of classes and races — it is 
only the nineteenth century that has recognised 
this faculty as its sixth sense. Owing to this 
mingling, the past of every form and mode of life, 
and of cultures which were formerly closely con- 
tiguous and superimposed on one another, flows 
forth into us " modern souls " ; our instincts now 
run back in all directions, we ourselves are a kind 
of chaos : in the end, as we have said, the spirit 
perceives its advantage therein. By means of our 
semi-barbarity in body and in desire, we have secret 
access everywhere, such as a noble age never had ; 
we have access above all to the labyrinth of imper- 
fect civilisations, and to every form of semi- 
barbarity that has at any time existed on earth ; 
and in so far as the most considerable part of 
human civilisation hitherto has just been semi- 
barbarity, the " historical sense " implies almost the 
sense and instinct for everything, the taste and 
tongue for everything : whereby it immediately 
proves itself to be an ignoble sense. For instance, 



1 68 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

we enjoy Homer once more : it is perhaps our 
happiest acquisition that we know how to appre- 
ciate Homer, whom men of distinguished culture 
(as the French of the seventeenth century, like 
Saint-Evremond, who reproached him for his esprit 
vaste, and even Voltaire, the last echo of the cen- 
tury) cannot and could not so easily appropriate — 
whom they scarcely permitted themselves to enjoy. 
The very decided Yea and Nay of their palate, 
their promptly ready disgust, their hesitating reluc- 
tance with regard to everything strange, their 
horror of the bad taste even of lively curiosity, and 
in general the averseness of every distinguished 
and self-sufficing culture to avow a new desire, a 
dissatisfaction with its own condition, or an admira- 
tion of what is strange : all this determines and 
disposes them unfavourably even towards the best 
things of the world which are not their property or 
could not become their prey — and no faculty is more 
unintelligible to such men than just this historical 
sense, with its truckling, plebeian curiosity. The 
case is not different with Shakespeare, that mar- 
vellous Spanish-Moorish-Saxon synthesis of taste, 
over whom an ancient Athenian of the circle of 
iEschylus would have half-killed himself with 
laughter or irritation : but we — accept precisely this 
wild motleyness, this medley of the most delicate, 
the most coarse, and the most artificial, with a 
secret confidence and cordiality ; we enjoy it as a 
refinement of art reserved expressly for us, and 
allow ourselves to be as little disturbed by the 
repulsive fumes and the proximity of the English 
populace in which Shakespeare's art and taste lives, 



OUR VIRTUES. 169 

as perhaps on the Chiaja of Naples, where, with all 
our senses awake, we go our way, enchanted and 
voluntarily, in spite of the drain-odour of the lower 
quarters of the town. That as men of the "historical 
sense" we have our virtues, is not to be disputed : — 
we are unpretentious, unselfish, modest, brave, 
habituated to self-control and self-renunciation, 
very grateful, very patient, very complaisant — but 
with all this we are perhaps not very "tasteful." 
Let us finally confess it, that what is most difficult 
for us men of the " historical sense " to grasp, feel, 
taste, and love, what finds us fundamentally pre- 
judiced and almost hostile, is precisely the perfec- 
tion and ultimate maturity in every culture and art, 
the essentially noble in works and men, their 
moment of smooth sea and halcyon self-sufficiency, 
the goldenness and coldness which all things show 
that have perfected themselves. Perhaps our great 
virtue of the historical sense is in necessary contrast 
to good taste, at least to the very best taste ; and we 
can only evoke in ourselves imperfectly, hesitatingly, 
and with compulsion the small, short, and happy 
godsends and glorifications of human life as they 
shine here and there : those moments and mar- 
vellous experiences, when a great power has volun- 
tarily come to a halt before the boundless and 
infinite, — when a superabundance of refined delight 
has been enjoyed by a sudden checking and 
petrifying, by standing firmly and planting oneself 
fixedly on still trembling ground. Proportionate- 
ness is strange to us, let us confess it to ourselves ; 
our itching is really the itching for the infinite, 
the immeasurable. Like the rider on his forward 



I/O BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

panting horse, we let the reins fall before the infinite, 
we modern men, we semi-barbarians — and are only 
in our highest bliss when we — are in most danger. 



225. 

^Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utili- 
tarianism, or eudaemonism, all those modes of 
thinking which measure the worth of things accord- 
ing to pleasure and pain^ that is, according to 
accompanying circumstances and secondary con- 
siderations, are plausible modes of thought and 
naivetes, which every one conscious of creative 
powers and an artist's conscience will look down 
upon with scorn, though not without sympathy. 
Sympathy ioxyou ! — to be sure, that is not sympathy 
as you understand it : it is not sympathy for social 
" distress," for " society " with its sick and mis- 
fortuned, for the hereditarily vicious and defective 
who lie on the ground around us ; still less is it 
sympathy for the grumbling, vexed, revolutionary 
slave-classes who strive after power — they call it 
" freedom." Our sympathy is a loftier and further- 
sighted sympathy : — we see how man dwarfs himself, 
how you dwarf him ! and there are moments when 
we view your sympathy with an indescribable 
anguish, when we resist it, — when we regard your 
seriousness as more dangerous than any kind of 
levity. You want, if possible — and there is not a 
more foolish " if possible " — to do away with suffer- 
ing; and we? — it really seems that we would rather 
have it increased and made worse than it has 
ever been ! Well-being, as you understand it — 



OUR VIRTUES. 171 

is certainly not a goal ; it seems to us an end ; a 
condition which at once renders man ludicrous and 
contemptible — and makes his destruction desirable ! 
The discipline of suffering, oi great suffering — know 
ye not that it is only this discipline that has pro- 
duced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? 
The tension of soul in misfortune which communi- 
cates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack 
and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in under- 
going, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting mis- 
fortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, 
spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon 
the soul — has it not been bestowed through suffer- 
ing, through the discipline of great suffering ? In 
man creature and creator are united : in man there 
is not only matter, shred, excess, clay, mire, folly, 
chaos ; but there is also the creator, the sculptor, 
the hardness of the hammer, the divinity of the 
spectator, and the seventh day — do ye understand 
this contrast? And that your sympathy for the 
" creature in man " applies to that which has to be 
fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched, roasted, an- 
nealed, refined — to that which must necessarily 
suffer^ and is meant to suffer ? And our sympathy 
— do ye not understand what our reverse sympathy 
applies to, when it resists your sympathy as the 
worst of all pampering and enervation ? — So it is 
sympathy against sympathy ! — But to repeat it 
once more, there are higher problems than the pro- 
blems of pleasure and pain and sympathy ; and all 
systems of philosophy which deal only with these 
are naivetes. 



172 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

226. 

We Immoralists, — This world with which we are 
concerned, in which we have to fear and love, this 
almost invisible, inaudible world of delicate com- 
mand and delicate obedience, a world of " almost " 
in every respect, captious, insidious, sharp, and 
tender — yes, it is well protected from clumsy 
spectators and familiar curiosity ! We are woven 
into a strong net and garment of duties, and cannot 
disengage ourselves — precisely here, we are " men 
of duty," even we ! Occasionally it is true we 
dance in our " chains " and betwixt our " swords " ; 
it is none the less true that more often we gnash our 
teeth under the circumstances, and are impatient at 
the secret hardship of our lot. But do what we 
will, fools and appearances say of us : " these are 
men without duty," — we have always fools and 
appearances against us ! 



227. 

Honesty, granting that it is the virtue from which 
we cannot rid ourselves, we free spirits — well, we 
will labour at it with all our perversity and love, and 
not tire of " perfecting '' ourselves in our virtue, 
which alone remains : may its glance some day 
overspread like a gilded, blue, mocking twilight this 
aging civilisation with its dull gloomy seriousness ! 
And if, nevertheless, our honesty should one day 
grow weary, and sigh, and stretch its limbs, and find 
us too hard, and would fain have it pleasanter, 
easier, and gentler, like an agreeable vice, let us 



OUR VIRTUES. 173 

remain hard^wo, latest Stoics, and let us send to its 
help whatever devilry we have in us : — our disgust 
at the clumsy and undefined, our " nitimur in veti- 
turn',' our love of adventure, our sharpened and 
fastidious curiosity, our most subtle, disguised, 
intellectual Will to Power and universal conquest, 
which rambles and roves avidiously around all the 
realms of the future — let us go with all our " devils " 
to the help of our " God " ! It is probable that 
people will misunderstand and mistake us on that 
account : what does it matter ! They will say : 
" Their ^ honesty ' — that is their devilry, and nothing 
else!" What does it matter! And even if they 
were right — have not all Gods hitherto been such 
sanctified, re-baptized devils ? And after all, what 
do we know of ourselves ? And what the spirit that 
leads us wants to be called? (It is a question of 
names.) And how many spirits we harbour ? Our 
honesty, we free spirits — let us be careful lest it be- 
come our vanity, our ornament and ostentation, our 
limitation, our stupidity ! Every virtue inclines to 
stupidity, every stupidity to virtue ; " stupid to the 
point of sanctity," they say in Russia, — let us be care- 
ful lest out of pure honesty we do not eventually 
become saints and bores ! Is not life a hundred 
times too short for us — to bore ourselves ? One 
would have to believe in eternal life in order to. . . . 



228. 

I hope to be forgiven for discovering that all 
moral philosophy hitherto has been tedious and has 
belonged to the soporific appliances — and that 



1/4 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

" virtue," in my opinion, has been more injured by 
the tediousness of its advocates than by anything 
else ; at the same time, however, I would not wish 
to overlook their general usefulness. It is desirable 
that as few people as possible should reflect upon 
morals, and consequently it is very desirable that 
morals should not some day become interesting ! 
But let us not be afraid ! Things still remain to- 
day as they have always been : I see no one in 
Europe who has (or discloses) an idea of the fact 
that philosophising concerning morals might be 
conducted in a dangerous, captious, and ensnaring 
manner — that calamity might be involved therein. 
Observe, for example, the indefatigable, inevitable 
English utilitarians : how ponderously and respect- 
ably they stalk on, stalk along (a Homeric metaphor 
expresses it better) in the footsteps of Bentham, 
just as he had already stalked in the footsteps of 
the respectable Helvetius ! (no, he was not a 
dangerous man, Helvetius, ce senateur Pococurante^ 
to use an expression of Galiani). No new thought, 
nothing of the nature of a finer turning or better 
expression of an old thought, not even a proper 
history of what has been previously thought on the 
subject : an impossible literature, taking it all in all, 
unless one knows how to leaven it with some mis- 
chief. In effect, the old English vice called cant^ 
which is moral Tartuffism^ has insinuated itself also 
into these moralists (whom one must certainly read 
with an eye to their motives if one must read them), 
concealed this time under the new form of the 
scientific spirit ; moreover, there is not absent from 
them a secret struggle with the pangs of conscience, 



OUR VIRTUES. 175 

from which a race of former Puritans must natur- 
ally suffer, in all their scientific tinkering with 
morals. (Is not a moralist the opposite of a Puritan ? 
That is to say, as a thinker who regards morahty as 
questionable, as worthy of interrogation, in short, 
as a problem ? Is moralising not — immoral ?) In 
the end, they all want English morality to be re- 
cognised as authoritative, inasmuch as mankind, or 
the "general utility," or "the happiness of the 
greatest number," — no ! the happiness of England, 
will be best served thereby. They would like, by 
all means, to convince themselves that the striving 
after English happiness, I mean after comfort and 
fashion (and in the highest instance, a seat in Parlia- 
ment), is at the same time the true path of virtue ; 
in fact, that in so far as there has been virtue in the 
world hitherto, it has just consisted in such striving. 
Not one of those ponderous, conscience-stricken 
herding-animals (who undertake to advocate the 
cause of egoism as conducive to the general wel- 
fare) wants to have any knowledge or inkling of 
the facts that the " general welfare " is no ideal, no 
goal, no notion that can be at all grasped, but is 
only a nostrum, — that what is fair to one may not at 
all be fair to another, that the requirement of one 
morality for all is really a detriment to higher men, 
in short, that there is a distinction of rank between 
man and man, and consequently between morality 
and morality. They are an unassuming and funda- 
mentally mediocre species of men, these utilitarian 
Englishmen, and, as already remarked, in so far as 
they are tedious, one cannot think highly enough of 
their utility. One ought even to encourage them, 



176 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

as has been partially attempted in the following 
rhymes : — 

Hail, ye worthies, barrow-wheeling, 
" Longer — better," aye revealing, 

Stiffer aye in head and knee ; 
Unenraptured, never jesting, 
Mediocre everlasting. 

Sans genie et sans esprit! 

229. 

In these later ages, which may be proud of their 
humanity, there still remains so much fear, so much 
superstition of the fear, of the " cruel wild beast," the 
mastering of which constitutes the very pride of 
these humaner ages — that even obvious truths, as 
if by the agreement of centuries, have long remained 
unuttered, because they have the appearance of 
helping the finally slain wild beast back to life 
again. I perhaps risk something when I allow 
such a truth to escape ; let others capture it again 
and give it so much "milk of pious sentiment"* to 
drink, that it will lie down quiet and forgotten, in 
its old corner. — One ought to learn anew about 
cruelty, and open one's eyes ; one ought at last to 
learn impatience, in order that such immodest gross 
errors — as, for instance, have been fostered by 
ancient and modern philosophers with regard to 
tragedy — may no longer wander about virtuously 
and boldly. Almost everything that we call 
" higher culture " is based upon the spiritualising 

"* An expression from Schiller's William Tell, Act IV., 
Scene 3. 



OUR VIRTUES. 177 

and intensifying of cruelty — this is my thesis ; the 
" wild beast " has not been slain at all, it lives, it 
flourishes, it has only been — transfigured. That 
which constitutes the painful delight of tragedy is 
cruelty ; that which operates agreeably in so-called 
tragic sympathy, and at the basis even of everything 
sublime, up to the highest and most delicate thrills 
of metaphysics, obtains its sweetness solely from the 
intermingled ingredient of cruelty. What the Roman 
enjoys in the arena, the Christian in the ecstasies of 
the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of the faggot 
and stake, or of the bull-fight, the present-day 
Japanese who presses his way to the tragedy, the 
workman of the Parisian suburbs who has a home- 
sickness for bloody revolutions, the Wagnerienne 
who, with unhinged will, " undergoes " the perform- 
ance of " Tristan and Isolde " — what all these enjoy, 
and strive with mysterious ardour to drink in, is the 
philtre of the great Circe " cruelty." Here, to be 
sure, we must put aside entirely the blundering 
psychology of former times, which could only teach 
with regard to cruelty that it originated at the sight 
of the suffering of others: there is an abundant, 
superabundant enjoyment even in one's own suffer- 
ing, in causing one's own suffering — and wherever 
man has allowed himself to be persuaded to self- 
denial in the religious sense, or to self-mutilation, 
as among the Phoenicians and ascetics, or in 
general, to desensualisation, decarnalisation, and 
contrition, to Puritanical repentance-spasms, to 
vivisection of conscience and to Pascal-like sacri- 
fizio deW intelleto, he is secretly allured and impelled 
forwards by his cruelty, by the dangerous thrill of 

M 



178 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

cruelty towards himself, — Finally, let us consider 
that even the seeker of knowledge operates as an- 
artist and glorifier of cruelty, in that he compels his 
spirit to perceive against its own inclination, and 
often enough against the wishes of his heart : — he 
forces it to say Nay, where he would like to affirm, 
love, and adore ; indeed, every instance of taking 
a thing profoundly and fundamentally, is a violation, 
an intentional injuring of the fundamental will of 
the spirit, which instinctively aims at appearance 
and superficiality, — even in every desire for know- 
ledge there is a drop of cruelty. 

230. 
Perhaps what I have here said about a " funda- 
mental will of the spirit " may not be understood 
without further details ; I may be allowed a word 
of explanation. — That imperious something which 
is popularly called " the spirit," wishes to be master 
internally and externally, and to feel itself master : 
it has the will of a multiplicity for a simplicity, a 
binding, taming, imperious, and essentially ruling 
will. Its requirements and capacities here, are the 
same as those assigned by physiologists to every- 
thing that lives, grows, and multiplies. The power 
of the spirit to appropriate foreign elements reveals 
itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to 
the old, to simplify the manifold, to overlook or 
repudiate the absolutely contradictory ; just as it 
arbitrarily re-underlines, makes prominent, and 
falsifies for itself certain traits and lines in the foreign 
elements, in every portion of the " outside world." 
Its object thereby is the incorporation of new " ex- 



OUR VIRTUES. 179 

periences," the assortment of new things in the old 
arrangements — in short, growth ; or more properly, 
the feeling of growth, the feeling of increased power 
— is its object. This same will has at its service an 
apparently opposed impulse of the spirit, a suddenly 
adopted preference of ignorance, of arbitrary 
shutting out, a closing of windows, an inner denial 
of this or that, a prohibition to approach, a sort of 
defensive attitude against much that is knowable, a 
contentment with obscurity, with the shutting-in 
horizon, an acceptance and approval of ignorance : 
as that which is all necessary according to the degree 
of its appropriating power, its " digestive power," to 
speak figuratively (and in fact " the spirit" resembles 
a stomach more than anything else). Here also 
belong an occasional propensity of the spirit to let 
itself be deceived (perhaps with a waggish suspicion 
that it is not so and so, but is only allowed to pass 
as such), a delight in uncertainty and ambiguity, an 
exulting enjoyment of arbitrary, out-of-the-way 
narrowness and mystery, of the too-near, of the 
foreground, of the magnified, the diminished, the 
misshapen, the beautified — an enjoyment of the 
arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power. 
Finally, in this connection, there is the not un- 
scrupulous readiness of the spirit to deceive other 
spirits and dissemble before them — the constant 
pressing and straining of a creating, shaping, change- 
able power : the spirit enjoys therein its craftiness 
and its variety of disguises, it enjoys also its feeling 
of security therein — it is precisely by its Protean arts 
that it is best protected and concealed ! — Counter to 
this propensity for appearance, for simplification, for 



l80 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

a disguise, for a cloak, in short, for an outside — for 
every outside is a cloak — there operates the sublime 
tendency of the man of knowledge, which takes, and 
insists on taking things profoundly, variously, and 
thoroughly ; as a kind of cruelty of the intellectual 
conscience and taste, which every courageous thinker 
will acknowledge in himself, provided, as it ought 
to be, that he has sharpened and hardened his eye 
sufficiently long for introspection, and is accustomed 
to severe discipline and even severe words. He 
will say : " There is something cruel in the tendency 
of my spirit " : let the virtuous and amiable try to 
convince him that it is not so ! In fact, it would sound 
nicer, if, instead of our cruelty, perhaps our "extrava- 
gant honesty" were talked about, whispered about 
and glorified — we free, very free spirits — and some 
day perhaps such will actually be our — posthumous 
glory ! Meanwhile — for there is plenty of time 
until then — we should be least inclined to deck our- 
selves out in such florid and fringed moral verbiage ; 
our whole former work has just made us sick of this 
taste and its sprightly exuberance. They are 
beautiful, glistening, jingling, festive words : 
honesty, love of truth, love of wisdom, sacrifice for 
knowledge, heroism of the truthful — there is some- 
thing in them that makes one's heart swell with 
pride. But we anchorites and marmots have long 
ago persuaded ourselves in all the secrecy of an 
anchorite's conscience, that this worthy parade of 
verbiage also belongs to the old false adornment, 
frippery, and gold-dust of unconscious human vanity, 
and that even under such flattering colour and 
repainting, the terrible original text homo natura 



OUR VIRTUES. l8l 

must again be recognised. In effect, to translate 
man back again into nature ; to master the many- 
vain and visionary interpretations and subordinate 
meanings which have hitherto been scratched and 
daubed over the eternal original text, homo natura; 
to bring it about that man shall henceforth stand 
before man as he now, hardened by the discipline 
of science, stands before the other forms of nature, 
with fearless CEdipus-eyes, and stopped Ulysses- 
ears, deaf to the enticements of old metaphysical 
bird-catchers, who have piped to him far too long : 
" Thou art more ! thou art higher ! thou hast a 
different origin !'' — this may be a strange and 
foolish task, but that it is a task, who can deny ! 
Why did we choose it, this foolish task ? Or, to 
put the question differently : " Why knowledge at 
all ?" Every one will ask us about this. And thus 
pressed, we, who have asked ourselves the question 
a hundred times, have not found, and cannot find 
any better answer. . . , 

231. 

Learning alters us, it does what all nourishment 
does that does not merely "conserve" — as the phy- 
siologist knows. But at the bottom of our souls, 
quite " down below," there is certainly something 
unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of pre- 
determined decision and answer to predetermined, 
chosen questions. In each cardinal problem there 
speaks an unchangeable "I am this "; a thinker can- 
not learn anew about man and woman, for instance, 
but can only learn fully — he can only follow to the 
end what is " fixed " about them in himself. Occa- 



1 82 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

sionally we find certain solutions of problems 
which make strong beliefs for us ; perhaps they 
are henceforth called "convictions." Later on — 
one sees in them only footsteps to self-knowledge, 
guide-posts to the problem which we ourselves are 
— or more correctly to the great stupidity which 
we embody, our spiritual fate, the unteachable in us, 
quite " down below." — In view of this liberal com- 
pliment which I have just paid myself, permission 
will perhaps be more readily allowed me to utter 
some truths about "woman as she is," provided 
that it is known at the outset how literally they 
are merely — my truths. 

232. 

Woman wishes to be independent, and therefore 
she begins to enlighten men about " woman as she 
is " — this is one of the worst developments of the 
general uglifying of Europe. For what must these 
clumsy attempts of feminine scientificality and 
self-exposure bring to light ! Woman has so much 
cause for shame ; in woman there is so much 
pedantry, superficiality, schoolmasterliness, petty 
presumption, unbridledness, and indiscretion con- 
cealed — study only woman^s behaviour towards 
children ! — which has really been best restrained 
and dominated hitherto by \)s\^fear of man. Alas, 
if ever the " eternally tedious in woman " — she has 
plenty of it ! — is allowed to venture forth ! if she 
begins radically and on principle to unlearn her 
wisdom and art — of charming, of playing, of 
frightening-away-sorrow, of alleviating and taking- 
easily; if she forgets her delicate aptitude for 



OUR VIRTUES. 183 

agreeable desires ! Female voices are already 
raised, which, by Saint Aristophanes ! make one 
afraid : — with medical explicitness it is stated 
in a threatening manner what woman first and 
. last requires from man. Is it not in the very 
worst taste that woman thus sets herself up to be 
scientific ? Enlightenment hitherto has fortunately 
been men's affair, men's gift — we remained there- 
with " among ourselves " ; and in the end, in view 
of all that women write about " woman," we may 
well have considerable doubt as to whether woman 
really desires enlightenment about herself— and can 
desire it. If woman does not thereby seek a new 
ornament for herself — I believe ornamentation be- 
longs to the eternally feminine ? — why, then, she 
wishes to make herself feared : perhaps she thereby 
wishes to get the mastery. But she does not want 
truth— what does woman care for truth! From 
the very first nothing is more foreign, more repug- 
nant, or more hostile to woman than truth — her 
great art is falsehood, her chief concern is appear- 
ance and beauty. Let us confess it, we men : 
we honour and love this very art and this very 
instinct in woman : we who have the hard task, 
and for our recreation gladly seek the company of 
beings under whose hands, glances, and delicate 
follies, our seriousness, our gravity, and profundity 
appear almost like follies to us. Finally, I ask the 
question : Did a woman herself ever acknowledge 
profundity in a woman's mind, or justice in a 
woman's heart? And is it not true that on the 
whole " woman '' has hitherto been most despised 
by woman herself, and not at all by us ? — We men 



r84 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

desire that woman should not continue to com- 
promise herself by enlightening us ; just as it was 
man's care and the consideration for woman, when 
the church decreed : mulier taceat in ecclesia. It 
was to the benefit of woman when Napoleon gave 
the too eloquent Madame de Stael to understand : 
inulier taceat in politicis ! — and in my opinion, he 
is a true friend of woman who calls out to women 
to-day : mulier taceat de muliere I 

233. 
It betrays corruption of the instincts — apart from 
the fact that it betrays bad taste — when a woman 
refers to Madame Roland, or Madame de Stael, or 
Monsieur George Sand, as though something were 
proved thereby in favour of " woman as she is." 
Among men, these are the three comical women 
as they are — nothing more ! — and just the best 
involuntary counter - arguments against feminine 
emancipation and autonomy. 

234. 
Stupidity in the kitchen ; woman as cook ; the 
terrible thoughtlessness with which the feeding of 
the family and the master of the house is managed ! 
Woman does not understand what food means^ and 
she insists on being cook ! If woman had been a 
thinking creature, she should certainly, as cook 
for thousands of years, have discovered the most 
important physiological facts, and should likewise 
have got possession of the healing art ! Through 
bad female cooks — through the entire lack of reason 
in the kitchen — the development of mankind has 



OUR VIRTUES. l8S 

been longest retarded and most interfered with ; 
even to-day matters are very little better. — A word 
to High School girls. 

235. 
There are turns and casts of fancy, there are 
sentences, little handfuls of words, in which a whole 
culture, a whole society suddenly crystallises itself. 
Among these is the incidental remark of Madame 
de Lambert to her son : ^' Mon ami, ne vous per- 
mettez jamais que des folies, qui vous feront grand 
plaisir'' — the motherliest and wisest remark, by the 
way, that was ever addressed to a son. 

236. 
I have no doubt that every noble woman will 
oppose what Dante and Goethe believed about 
woman — the former when he sang, " ella guardava 
suso, ed io in lei,'' and the latter when he interpreted 
It, "the eternally feminine draws us aloft'' \ for this 
is just what she believes of the eternally masculine. 

237. 

Seven Apophthegms for Women. 

How the longest ennui flees, 
When a man comes to our knees ! 

Age, alas ! and science staid, 
Furnish even weak virtue aid. 

Sombre garb and silence meet : 
Dress for every dame — discreet. 

Whom I thank when in my bliss ? 
God ! — and my good tailoress ! 



1 86 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

Young, a flower-decked cavern home ; 
Old, a dragon thence doth roam. 

Noble title, leg that's fine, 

Man as well : Oh, were he mine ! 

Speech in brief and sense in mass — 
Slippery for the jenny-ass ! 

237A. 

Woman has hitherto been treated by men like 
birds, which, losing their way, have come down 
among them from an elevation : as something 
delicate, fragile, wild, strange, sweet, and animating 
— but as something also which must be cooped up 
to prevent it flying away, 

238. 
To be mistaken in the fundamental problem of 
*' man and woman," to deny here the profoundest 
antagonism and the necessity for an eternally 
hostile tension, to dream here perhaps of equal 
rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations : 
that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness ; and 
a thinker who has proved himself shallow at this 
dangerous spot — shallow in instinct ! — may gener- 
ally be regarded as suspicious, nay more, as betrayed, 
as discovered ; he will probably prove too " short " 
for all fundamental questions of life, future as well 
as present, and will be unable to descend into any 
of the depths. On the other hand, a man who has 
depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has also 
the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity 



OUR VIRTUES. 187 

and harshness, and easily confounded with them, 
can only think of woman as Orientals do : he must 
conceive of her as a possession, as confinable pro- 
perty, as a being predestined for service and accom- 
plishing her mission therein — he must take his 
stand in this matter upon the immense rationality 
of Asia, upon the superiority of the instinct of Asia, 
as the Greeks did formerly ; those best heirs and 
scholars of Asia — who, as is well known, with their 
increasing culture and amplitude of power, from 
Homer to the time of Pericles, became gradually 
stricter towards woman, in short, more oriental. 
How necessary, how logical, even how humanely 
desirable this was, let us consider for ourselves ! 

239. 
The weaker sex has in no previous age been 
treated with so much respect by men as at present 
— this belongs to the tendency and fundamental 
taste of democracy, in the same way as disrespect- 
fulness to old age — what wonder is it that abuse 
should be immediately made of this respect ? They 
want more, they learn to make claims, the tribute 
of respect is at last felt to be well-nigh galling; 
rivalry for rights, indeed actual strife itself, would 
be preferred : in a word, woman is losing modesty. 
And let us immediately add that she is also losing 
taste. She is unlearning to fear man : but the 
woman who " unlearns to fear " sacrifices her most 
womanly instincts. That woman should venture 
forward when the fear-inspiring quality in man—or 
more definitely, the man in man — is no longer either 
desired or fully developed, is reasonable enough and 



1 88 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

also intelligible enough ; what is more difficult to 
understand is that precisely thereby — woman 
deteriorates. This is what is happening nowadays : 
let us not deceive ourselves about it ! Wherever 
the industrial spirit has triumphed over the military 
and aristocratic spirit, woman strives for the 
economic and legal independence of a clerk : 
** woman as clerkess " is inscribed on the portal of 
the modern society which is in course of formation. 
While she thus appropriates new rights, aspires to 
be " master," and inscribes " progress " of woman on 
her flags and banners, the very opposite realises 
itself with terrible obviousness : woman retrogrades. 
Since the French Revolution the influence of woman 
in Europe has declined in proportion as she has 
increased her rights and claims; and the "emancipa- 
tion of woman," in so far as it is desired and de- 
manded by women themselves (and not only by 
masculine shallow-pates), thus proves to be a re- 
markable symptom of the increased weakening and 
deadening of the most womanly instincts. There 
is stupidity in this movement, an almost masculine 
stupidity, of which a well-reared woman — who is 
always a sensible woman — might be heartily 
ashamed. To lose the intuition as to the ground 
upon which she can most surely achieve victory ; 
to neglect exercise in the use of her proper weapons ; 
to let-herself-go before man, perhaps even " to the 
book," where formerly she kept herself in control 
and in refined, artful humility ; to neutralise with 
her virtuous audacity man's faith in a veiled^ funda- 
mentally different ideal in woman, something 
eternally, necessarily feminine ; to emphatically 



OUR VIRTUES. 189 

and loquaciously dissuade man from the idea that 
woman must be preserved, cared for, protected, and 
indulged, like some delicate, strangely wild, and 
often pleasant domestic animal ; the clumsy and 
indignant collection of everything of the nature of 
servitude and bondage which the position of woman 
in the hitherto existing order of society has entailed 
and still entails (as though slavery were a counter- 
argument, and not rather a condition of every higher 
culture, of every elevation of culture) : — what does 
all this betoken, if not a disintegration of womanly 
instincts, a de-feminising ? Certainly, there are 
enough of idiotic friends and corrupters of woman 
amongst the learned asses of the masculine sex, who 
advise woman to de-feminise herself in this manner, 
and to imitate all the stupidities from which " man " 
in Europe, European "manliness," suffers, — who 
would like to lower woman to "general culture," 
indeed even to newspaper reading and meddling 
with politics. Here and there they wish even to 
make women into free spirits and literary workers : 
as though a woman without piety would not be 
something perfectly obnoxious or ludicrous to a 
profound and godless man ; — almost everywhere 
her nerves are being ruined by the most morbid 
and dangerous kind of music (our latest German 
music), and she is daily being made more hysterical 
and more incapable of fulfilling her first and last 
function, that of bearing robust children. They 
wish to " cultivate " her in general still more, and 
intend, as they say, to make the "weaker sex" strong 
by culture : as if history did not teach in the most 
emphatic manner that the " cultivating " of mankind 



igo BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

and his weakening — that is to say, the weakening, 
dissipating, and languishing of his force of will — 
have always kept pace with one another, and that 
the most powerful and influential women in the 
world (and lastly, the mother of Napoleon) had just 
to thank their force of will- — and not their school- 
masters! — for their power and ascendency over men. 
That which inspires respect in woman, and often 
enough fear also, is her nature^ which is more 
" natural " than that of man, her genuine, carnivora- 
like, cunning flexibility, her tiger-claws beneath the 
glove, her naivete in egoism, her untrainableness 
and innate wildness, the incomprehensibleness, 
extent, and deviation of her desires and virtues. , . . 
That which, in spite of fear, excites one's sympathy 
for the dangerous and beautiful cat, "woman," is 
that she seems more afflicted, more vulnerable, more 
necessitous of love and more condemned to dis- 
illusionment than any other creature. Fear and 
sympathy : it is with these feelings that man has 
hitherto stood in presence of woman, always with 
one foot already in tragedy, which rends while it 
delights. — What ? And all that is now to be at an 
end? And the disenchantment of woman is in 
progress? The tediousness of woman is slowly 
evolving ? Oh Europe ! Europe ! We know the 
horned animal which was always most attractive 
to thee, from which danger is ever again threatening 
thee! Thy old fable might once more become 
" history " — an immense stupidity might once again 
overmaster thee and carry thee away ! And no 
God concealed beneath it — no ! only an " idea," a 
" modern idea"! . . . • 



EIGHTH CHAPTER. 
PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. 

240. 

I HEARD, once again for the first time, Richard 
Wagner's overture to the Mastersingers : it is a 
piece of magnificent, gorgeous, heavy, latter-day art, 
which has the pride to presuppose two centuries of 
music as still living, in order that it may be under- 
stood : — it is an honour to Germans that such a 
pride did not miscalculate! What flavours and 
forces, what seasons and climes do we not find 
mingled in it ! It impresses us at one time as 
ancient, at another time as foreign, bitter, and too 
modern, it is as arbitrary as it is pompously 
traditional, it is not infrequently roguish, still oftener 
rough and coarse — it has fire and courage, and at 
the same time the loose, dun-coloured skin of fruits 
which ripen too late. It flows broad and full : and 
suddenly there is a moment of inexplicable hesita- 
tion, like a gap that opens between cause and effect, 
an oppression that makes us dream, almost a night- 
mare; but already it broadens and widens anew, the 
old stream of delight — the most manifold delight, 
— of old and new happiness; including especially 
the joy of the artist in himself, which he refuses to 



192 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

conceal, his astonished, happy cognisance of his 
mastery of the expedients here employed, the new, 
newly acquired, imperfectly tested expedients of 
art — as he apparently betrays to us. All in all, how- 
ever, no beauty, no South, nothing of the delicate 
southern clearness of the sky, nothing of grace, no 
dance, hardly a will for logic ; a certain clumsiness 
even, which is also emphasised, as though the artist 
wished to say to us : " It is part of my intention " ; 
a cumbersome drapery, something arbitrarily 
barbaric and ceremonious, a flirring of learned and 
venerable conceits and witticisms ; something 
German in the best and worst sense of the word, 
something in the German style, manifold, formless, 
and inexhaustible ; a certain German potency and 
super-plenitude of soul, which is not afraid to hide 
itself under the raffinements of decadence — which, 
perhaps, feels itself most at ease there ; a real, 
genuine token of the German soul, which is at the 
same time young and aged, too ripe and yet still 
too rich in futurity. This kind of music expresses 
best what I think of the Germans : they belong to 
the day before yesterday and the day after to- 
morrow — they have as yet no to-day, 

241. 

t We '* good Europeans," we also have hours when 
we allow ourselves a warm-hearted patriotism, a 
plunge and relapse into old loves and narrow views 
— I have just given an example of it — hours of 
national excitement, of patriotic anguish, and all 
other sorts of old-fashioned floods of sentiment. 
Duller spirits than we, may only get done with what 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. I93 

confines its operations in us to hours and plays 
itself out in hours — in a considerable time : some in 
half a year, others in half a lifetime, according to 
the speed and strength with which they digest and 
" change their material." Indeed, I could think of 
sluggish, hesitating races, which, even in our rapidly 
moving Europe, would require half a century ere 
they could surmount such atavistic attacks of 
patriotism and soil-attachment, and return once more 
to reason, that is to say, to " good Europeanism." 
And while digressing on this possibility, I happen 
to become an ear-witness of a conversation between 
two old patriots — they were evidently both hard of 
hearing and consequently spoke all the louder. 
" He has as much, and knows as much, philosophy 
as a peasant or a corps-student," said the one — " he 
is still innocent. But what does that matter now- 
adays ! It is the age of the masses : they lie on 
their belly before everything that is massive. And 
so also in politicis. A statesman who rears up for 
them a new Tower of Babel, some monstrosity of 
empire and power, they call * great ' — what does it 
matter that we more prudent and conservative ones 
dcJ not meanwhile give up the old belief that it is 
only the great thought that gives greatness to an 
action or affair. Supposing a statesman were to 
bring his people into the position of being obliged 
henceforth to practise * high politics,' for which they 
were by nature badly endowed and prepared, so 
that they would have to sacrifice their old and 
reliable virtues, out of love to a new and doubtful 
mediocrity ; — supposing a statesman were to con- 
demn his people generally to * practise politics/ 

N 



194 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

when they have hitherto had something better to 
do and think about, and when in the depths of their 
souls they have been unable to free themselves from 
a prudent loathing of the restlessness, emptiness, 
and noisy wranglings of the essentially politics- 
practising nations ; — supposing such a statesman 
were to stimulate the slumbering passions and 
avidities of his people, were to make a stigma out 
of their former diffidence and delight in aloofness, 
an offence out of their exoticism and hidden per- 
manency, were to depreciate their most radical pro- 
clivities, subvert their consciences, make their minds 
narrow, and their tastes * national ' — what ! a states- 
man who should do all this, which his people would 
have to do penance for throughout their whole future, 
if they had a future, such a statesman would hQ great y 
would he?'' — "Undoubtedly!" replied the other 
old patriot vehemently ; "otherwise he could not have 
done it ! It was mad perhaps to wish such a thing ! 
But perhaps everything great has just been mad at 
its commencement !'' — " Misuse of words !" cried 
his interlocutor, contradictorily — "strong! strong! 
Strong and mad ! Not great 1" — The old men had 
obviously become heated as they thus shouted their 
" truths " in each other's faces ; but I, in my happi- 
ness and apartness, considered how soon a stronger 
one will become master of the strong ; and also 
that there is a compensation for the intellectual 
superficialising of a nation — namely, in the deepen- 
ing of another. 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. I95 

242. 

Whether we call it " civilisation," or " humanis- 
ing," or " progress," which now distinguishes the 
European ; whether we call it simply, without praise 
or blame, by the political formula : the democratic 
movement in Europe — behind all the moral and 
political foregrounds pointed to by such formulas, 
an immense physiological process goes on, which is 
ever extending : the process of the assimilation of 
Europeans ; their increasing detachment from the 
conditions underwhich, climatically and hereditarily, 
united races originate ; their increasing independ- 
ence of every definite milieUy that for centuries 
would fain inscribe itself with equal demands on 
soul and body ; — that is to say, the slow emergence 
of an essentially super-national and nomadic species 
of man, who possesses, physiologically speaking, a 
maximum of the art and power of adaptation as his 
typical distinction. This process of the evolving 
European y which can be retarded in its ternpo by 
great relapses, but will perhaps just gain and grow 
thereby in vehemence and depth — the still raging 
storm and stress of " national sentiment " pertains 
to it, and also the anarchism which is appearing at 
present — this process will probably arrive at results 
on which its naive propagators and panegyrists, the 
apostles of " modern ideas," would least care to 
reckon. The same new conditions under which on 
an average a levelling and mediocrising of man will 
take place — a useful, industrious, variously service- 
able and clever herd-animal-like man — are in the 
highest degree suitable to give rise to exceptional 



196 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

men of the most dangerous and attractive qualities. 
For, while the capacity for adaptation, which is 
ever trying changing conditions, and begins a new 
work with every generation, almost with every 
decade, makes the powerfulness of the type im- 
possible ; while the collective impression of such 
future Europeans will probably be that of numerous, 
talkative, weak-willed, and very handy workmen 
who require a master, a commander, as they require 
their daily bread ; while, therefore, the democratising 
of Europe will tend to the production of a type 
prepared for slavery in the most subtle sense of the 
term : the strong man will necessarily in individual 
and exceptional cases, become stronger and richer 
than he has perhaps ever been before — owing to 
the unprejudicedness of his schooling, owing to the 
immense variety of practice, art, and disguise. I 
meant to say that the democratising of Europe is 
at the same time an involuntary arrangement for 
the rearing of tyrants — taking the word in all its 
meanings, even in its most spiritual sense. 

243. 
I hear with pleasure that our sun is moving 
rapidly towards the constellation Hercules : and I 
hope that the men on this earth will do like the 
sun. And we foremost, we good Europeans ! 

244. 

There was a time when it was customary to call 

Germans " deep," by way of distinction ; but now 

that the most successful type of new Germanism is 

covetous of quite other honours, and perhaps misses 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. I97 

"smartness" in all that has depth, it is almost 
opportune and patriotic to doubt whether we did 
not formerly deceive ourselves with that commenda- 
tion : in short, whether German depth is not at 
bottom something different and worse — and some- 
thing from which, thank God, we are on the point 
of successfully ridding ourselves. Let us try, then, 
to relearn with regard to German depth ; the only 
thing necessary for the purpose is a little vivi- 
section of the German soul. — The German soul is 
above all manifold, varied in its source, aggregated 
and superimposed, rather than actually built : this 
is owing to its origin. A German who would em- 
bolden himself to assert: "Two souls, alas, dwell in my 
breast/' would make a bad guess at the truth, or, more 
correctly, he would come far short of the truth about 
the number of souls. As a people made up of the most 
extraordinary mixing and mingling of races, per- 
hapseven with a preponderance of the pre- Aryan ele- 
ment, as the " people of the centre " in every sense 
of the term, the Germans are more intangible, more 
ample, more contradictory, more unknown, more 
incalculable, more surprising, and even more terrify- 
ing than other peoples are to themselves : — they 
escape definition^ and are thereby alone the despair 
of the French. It is characteristic of the Germans 
that the question : " What is German ?" never dies 
out among them. Kotzebue certainly knew his 
Germans well enough : " we are known," they cried 
jubilantly to him — but Sand also thought he knew 
them. Jean Paul knew what he was doing when 
he declared himself incensed at Fichte's lying, but 
patriotic flatteries and exaggerations, — but it is 



198 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

probable that Goethe thought differently about 
Germans from Jean Paul, even though he acknow- 
ledged him to be right with regard to Fichte. It 
is a question what Goethe really thought about the 
Germans ? — But about many things around him he 
never spoke explicitly, and all his life he knew how 
to keep an astute silence — probably he had good 
reason for it. It is certain that it was not the 
" Wars of Independence " that made him look up 
more joyfully, any more than it was the French 
Revolution, — the event on account of which he 
reconstructed his " Faust,'' and indeed the whole 
problem of " man," was the appearance of Napoleon. 
There are words of Goethe in which he condemns 
with impatient severity, as from a foreign land, that 
which Germans take a pride in : he once defined 
the famous German turn of mind as " Indulgence 
towards its own and others' weaknesses." Was he 
wrong? it is characteristic of Germans that one 
is seldom entirely wrong about them. The German 
soul has passages and galleries in it, there are caves, 
hiding-places, and dungeons therein ; its disorder 
has much of the charm of the mysterious ; the 
German is well acquainted with the by-paths to 
chaos. And as everything loves its symbol, so the 
German loves the clouds and all that is obscure, 
evolving, crepuscular, damp, and shrouded : it 
seems to him that everything uncertain, undeveloped, 
self-displacing, and growing is " deep." The German 
himself does not exist: he is becomings he is 
" developing himself" " Development " is therefore 
the essentially German discovery and hit in the 
great domain of philosophical formulas, — a ruling 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. I99 

idea, which, together with German beer and German 
music, is labouring to Germanise all Europe. 
Foreigners are astonished and attracted by the 
riddles which the conflicting nature at the basis of 
the German soul propounds to them (riddles which 
Hegel systematised and Richard Wagner has in the 
end set to music). " Good-natured and spiteful " 
— such a juxtaposition, preposterous in the case of 
every other people, is unfortunately only too often 
justified in Germany : one has only to live for a 
while among Swabians to know this! The clumsi- 
ness of the German scholar and his social distaste- 
fulness agree alarmingly well with his psychical 
rope-dancing and nimble boldness, of which all the 
Gods have learnt to be afraid. If any one wishes to 
see the " German soul " demonstrated ad oculos, let 
him only look at German taste, at German arts and 
manners : what boorish indifference to "taste"! How 
the noblest and the commonest stand there in juxta- 
position ! How disorderly and how rich is the whole 
constitution of this soul ! The German drags at his 
soul, he drags at everything he experiences. He 
digests his events badly ; he never gets " done " 
with them ; and German depth is often only a 
difficult, hesitating "digestion." And just as all 
chronic invalids, all dyspeptics, like what is con- 
venient, so the German loves " frankness " and 
" honesty '* ; it is so convenient to be frank and 
honest ! — This confidingness, this complaisance, this 
showing-the-cards of German honesty, is probably 
the most dangerous and most successful disguise 
which the German is up to nowadays : it is his 
proper Mephistophelean art ; with this he can 



200 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

" still achieve much" ! The German lets himself go, 
and thereby gazes with faithful, blue, empty German 
eyes — and other countries immediately confound 
him with his dressing-gown ! — I meant to say that, 
let " German depth " be what it will — among our- 
selves alone we perhaps take the liberty to laugh 
at it — we shall do well to continue henceforth to 
honour its appearance and good name, and not 
barter away too cheaply our old reputation as a 
people of depth for Prussian "smartness," and 
Berlin wit and sand. It is wise for a people to 
pose, and let itself be regarded, as profound, clumsy, 
good-natured, honest, and foolish : it might even be 
— profound to do so ! Finally, we should do honour 
to our name — we are not called the " tiusche Volk " 
(deceptive people) for nothing. . • , 

245. 
The " good old " time is past, it sang itself out in 
Mozart — how happy are we that his rococo still 
speaks to us, that his " good company," his tender 
enthusiasm, his childish delight in the Chinese and 
in flourishes, his courtesy of heart, his longing for 
the elegant, the amorous, the tripping, the tearful, 
and his belief in the South, can still appeal to some- 
thing left in us ! Ah, some time or other it will be 
over with it ! — but who can doubt that it will be 
over still sooner with the intelligence and taste for 
Beethoven ! For he was only the last echo of a 
break and transition in style, and not, like Mozart, 
the last echo of a great European taste which had 
existed for centuries. Beethoven is the inter- 
mediate event between an old mellow soul that is 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. 20I 

constantly breaking down, and a future over-young 
soul that is always coming ; there is spread over 
his music the twilight of eternal loss and eternal 
extravagant hope, — the same light in which Europe 
was bathed when it dreamed with Rousseau, when 
it danced round the Tree of Liberty of the Revolu- 
tion, and finally almost fell down in adoration 
before Napoleon. But how rapidly does this very 
sentiment now pale, how difficult nowadays is even 
the apprehension of this sentiment, how strangely 
does the language of Rousseau, Schiller, Shelley, 
and Byron sound to our ear, in whom collectively 
the same fate of Europe was able to speak, which 
knew how to sing in Beethoven ! — Whatever Ger- 
man music came afterwards, belongs to Roman- 
ticism, that is to say, to a movement which, histori- 
cally considered, was still shorter, more fleeting, and 
more superficial than that great interlude, the 
transition of Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon, 
and to the rise of democracy. Weber — but what do 
we care nowadays for " Freischutz " and " Oberon " ! 
Or Marschner's " Hans Heiling " and " Vampyre " ! 
Or even Wagner's " Tannhauser " ! That is extinct, 
although not yet forgotten music. This whole 
music of Romanticism, besides, was not noble 
enough, was not musical enough, to maintain its 
position anywhere but in the theatre and before 
the masses ; from the beginning it was second-rate 
music, which was little thought of by genuine 
musicians. It was different with Felix Mendels- 
sohn, that halcyon master, who, on account of his 
lighter, purer, happier soul, quickly acquired admira- 
tion, and was equally quickly forgotten : as the 



202 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

beautiful episode of German music. But with regard 
to Robert Schumann, who took things seriously, 
and has been taken seriously from the first — he was 
the last that founded a school, — do we not now 
regard it as a satisfaction, a relief, a deliverance, 
that this very Romanticism of Schumann*s has 
been surmounted? Schumann, fleeing into the 
"Saxon Switzerland" of his soul, with a half 
Werther-like, half Jean-Paul-like nature (assuredly 
not like Beethoven ! assuredly not like Byron !) — 
his Manfred music is a mistake and a misunder- 
standing to the extent of injustice; Schumann, 
with his taste, which was fundamentally a petty 
taste (that is to say, a dangerous propensity — 
doubly dangerous among Germans — for quiet 
lyricism and intoxication of the feelings), going 
constantly apart, timidly withdrawing and retiring, 
a noble weakling who revelled in nothing but 
anonymous joy an4 sorrow, from the beginning a 
sort of girl and noli me tangere — this Schumann 
was already merely a German event in music, and 
no longer a European event, as Beethoven had 
been, as in a still greater degree Mozart had been ; 
with Schumann German music was threatened with 
its greatest danger, that of losing the voice for the 
soul of Europe and sinking into a merely national 
affair. 

246. 

What a torture are books written in German to 
a reader who has a third ear ! How indignantly 
he stands beside the slowly turning swamp of sounds 
without tune and rhythms without dance, which 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. 203 

Germans call a *' book " ! And even the German 
who reads books ! How lazily, how reluctantly, 
how badly he reads ! How many Germans know, 
and consider it obligatory to know, that there is art 
in every good sentence — art which must be divined, 
if the sentence is to be understood ! If there is a 
misunderstanding about its tempo^ for instance, the 
sentence itself is misunderstood ! That one must 
not be doubtful about the rhythm -determining 
syllables, that one should feel the breaking of the 
too-rigid symmetry as intentional and as a charm, 
that one should lend a fine and patient ear to every 
staccato and every rubato^ that one should divine the 
sense in the sequence of the vowels and diphthongs, 
and how delicately and richly they can be tinted 
and retinted in the order of their arrangement — 
who among book-reading Germans is complaisant 
enough to recognise such duties and requirements, 
and to listen to so much art and intention in lan- 
guage? After all, one just "has no ear for it"; 
and so the most marked contrasts of style are not 
heard, and the most delicate artistry is as it were 
squandered on the deaf. — These were my thoughts 
when I noticed how clumsily and unintuitively 
two masters in the art of prose-writing have been 
confounded : one, whose words drop down hesi- 
tatingly and coldly, as from the roof of a damp 
cave — he counts on their dull sound and echo ; 
and another who manipulates his language like a 
flexible sword, and from his arm down into his toes 
feels the dangerous bliss of the quivering, over- 
sharp blade, which wishes to bite, hiss, and cut. 



204 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

247. 

How little the German style has to do with 
harmony and with the ear, is shown by the fact 
that precisely our good musicians themselves write 
badly. The German does not read aloud, he does 
not read for the ear, but only with his eyes ; he 
has put his ears away in the drawer for the time. 
In antiquity when a man read — which was seldom 
enough — he read something to himself, and in a 
loud voice ; they were surprised when any one read 
silently, and sought secretly the reason of it. In a 
loud voice: that is to say, with all the swellings, in- 
flections, and variations of key and changes oitempOy 
in which the ancient public world took delight. The 
laws of the written style were then the same as those 
of the spoken style; and these laws depended partly 
on the surprising development and refined require- 
ments of the ear and larynx ; partly on the strength, 
endurance, and power of the ancient lungs. In the 
ancient sense, a period is above all a physiological 
whole, inasmuch as it is comprised in one breath. 
Such periods as occur in Demosthenes and Cicero, 
swelling twice and sinking twice, and all in one 
breath, were pleasures to the men of antiquity, who 
knew by their own schooling how to appreciate the 
virtue therein, the rareness and the difficulty in the 
deliverance of such a period ; — we have really no 
right to the big period, we modern men, who are 
short of breath in every sense ! Those ancients, 
indeed, were all of them dilettanti in speaking, con- 
sequently connoisseurs, consequently critics — they 
thus brought their orators to the highest pitch ; in 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. 20$ 

the same manner as in the last century, when all 
Italian ladies and gentlemen knew how to sing, the 
virtuosoship of song (and with it also the art of 
melody) reached its elevation. In Germany, how- 
ever (until quite recently when a kind of platform 
eloquence began shyly and awkwardly enough to 
flutter its young wings), there was properly speak- 
ing only one kind of public and approximately 
artistical discourse — that delivered from the pulpit. 
The preacher was the only one in Germany who 
knew the weight of a syllable or a word, in what 
manner a sentence strikes, springs, rushes, flows, 
and comes to a close ; he alone had a conscience in 
his ears, often enough a bad conscience : for reasons 
are not lacking why proficiency in oratory should 
be especially seldom attained by a German, or 
almost always too late. The masterpiece of Ger- 
man prose is therefore with good reason the master- 
piece of its greatest preacher : the Bible has hitherto 
been the best German book. Compared with 
Luther's Bible, almost everything else is merely 
"literature" — something which has not grown in 
Germany, and therefore has not taken and does not 
take root in German hearts, as the Bible has done. 

248. 
There are two kinds of geniuses: one which 
above all engenders and seeks to engender, and 
another which willingly lets itself be fructified and 
brings forth. And similarly, among the gifted 
nations, there are those on whom the woman's 
problem of pregnancy has devolved, and the secret 
task of forming, maturing, and perfecting — the 



206 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, 

Greeks, for instance, were a nation of this kind, and 
so are the French ; and others which have to 
fructify and become the cause of new modes of 
hfe — Hke the Jews, the Romans, and, in all modesty 
be it asked : like the Germans ? — nations tortured 
and enraptured by unknown fevers and irresistibly 
forced out of themselves, amorous and longing for 
foreign races (for such as "let themselves be 
fructified"), and withal imperious, like everything 
conscious of being full of generative force, and con- 
sequently empowered "by the grace of God." 
These two kinds of geniuses seek each other like 
man and woman ; but they also misunderstand 
each other — like man and woman. 



249. 

Every nation has its own " Tartuffery," and 
calls that its virtue. — One does not know — cannot 
know, the best that is in ona 

250. 

What Europe owes to the Jews ?— Many things, 
good and bad, and above all one thing of the 
nature both of the best and the worst : the grand 
style in morality, the fearfulness and majesty of 
infinite demands, of infinite significations, the whole 
Romanticism and sublimity of moral questionable- 
ness — and consequently just the most attractive, 
ensnaring, and exquisite element in those irides- 
cences and allurements to life, in the aftersheen of 
which the sky of our European culture, its evening 
sky, now glows — perhaps glows out. For this, we 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. 207 

artists among the spectators and philosophers, are 
— grateful to the Jews. 

251. 

It must be taken into the bargain, if various 
clouds and disturbances — in short, slight attacks of 
stupidity — pass over the spirit of a people that 
suffers and wants to suffer from national nervous 
fever and political ambition : for instance, among 
present-day Germans there is alternately the anti- 
French folly, the anti-Semitic folly, the anti-Polish 
folly, the Christian-romantic folly, the Wagnerian 
folly, the Teutonic folly, the Prussian folly (just 
look at those poor historians, the Sybels and Treit- 
schkes, and their closely bandaged heads), and 
whatever else these little obscurations of the Ger- 
man spirit and conscience may be called. May it 
be forgiven me that I, too, when on a short daring 
sojourn on very infected ground, did not remain 
wholly exempt from the disease, but like every one 
else, began to entertain thoughts about matters 
which did not concern me — the first symptom of 
political infection. About the Jews, for instance, 
listen to the following : — I have never yet met a • 
German who was favourably inclined to the Jews ; 
and however decided the repudiation of actual 
anti-Semitism may be on the part of all prudent 
and political men, this prudence and policy is not 
perhaps directed against the nature of the senti- 
ment itself, but only against its dangerous excess, 
and especially against the distasteful and infamous 
expression of this excess of sentiment ; — on this 
point we must not deceive ourselves. That Ger- 



208 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

many has amply stifficient Jews, that the German 
stomach, the German blood, has difficulty (and 
will long have difficulty) in disposing only of this 
quantity of "Jew" — as the Italian, the Frenchman, 
and the Englishman have done by means of 
a stronger digestion : — that is the unmistakable 
declaration and language of a general instinct, to 
which one must listen and according to which one 
must act. " Let no more Jews come in ! And 
shut the doors, especially towards the East (also 
towards Austria) ! " — thus commands the instinct 
of a people whose nature is still feeble and uncertain, 
so that it could be easily wiped out, easily extin- 
guished, by a stronger race. The Jews, however, 
are beyond all doubt the strongest, toughest, and 
purest race at present living in Europe ; they know 
how to succeed even under the worst conditions 
(in fact better than under favourable ones), by 
means of virtues of some sort, which one would like 
nowadays to label as vices — owing above all to a 
resolute faith which does not need to be ashamed 
before " modern ideas " ; they alter only, when they 
do alter, in the same way that the Russian Empire 
makes its conquest — as an empire that has plenty 
of time and is not of yesterday — namely, according 
to the principle, " as slowly as possible " ! A 
thinker who has the future of Europe at heart, will, 
in all his perspectives concerning the future, calcu- 
late upon the Jews, as he will calculate upon the 
Russians, as above all the surest and likeliest 
factors in the great play and battle of forces. That 
which is at present called a " nation " in Europe, 
and is really rather a res facta than nata (indeed, 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. 209 

sometimes confusingly similar to a res ficta et pictd), 
is in every case something evolving, young, easily 
displaced, and not yet a race, much less such a 
race cere perennius^ as the Jews are : such "nations" 
should most carefully avoid all hot-headed rivalry 
and hostility ! It is certain that the Jews, if they 
desired — or if they were driven to it, as the anti- 
Semites seem to wish — could now have the ascend- 
ency, nay, literally the supremacy, over Europe ; 
that they are not working and planning for that 
end is equally certain. Meanwhile, they rather 
wish and desire, even somewhat importunately, to 
be insorbed and absorbed by Europe ; they long to 
be finally settled, authorised, and respected some- 
where, and wish to put an end to the nomadic life, 
to the "wandering Jew"; — and one should certainly 
take account of this impulse and tendency, and 
make advances to it (it possibly betokens a mitiga- 
tion of the Jewish instincts) : for which purpose it 
would perhaps be useful and fair to banish the anti- 
Semitic bawlers out of the country. One should 
make advances with all prudence, and with selec- 
tion ; pretty much as the English nobility do. 
It stands to reason that the more powerful and 
strongly marked types of new Germanism could 
enter into relation with the Jews with the least 
hesitation, for instance, the nobleman officer from 
the Prussian border: it would be interesting in many 
ways to see whether the genius for money and 
patience (and especially some intellect and intel- 
lectuality — sadly lacking in the place referred to) 
could not in addition be annexed and trained to 
the hereditary art of commanding and obeying— 

O 



2IO BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

for both of which the country in question has now 
a classic reputation. But here it is expedient to 
break off my festal discourse and my sprightly 
Teutonomania : for I have already reached my 
serious topic^ the " European problem," as I under- 
stand it, the rearing of a new ruling caste for 
Europe. 

252. 

They are not a philosophical race — the English : 
Bacon represents an attack on the philosophical 
spirit generally, Hobbes, Hume, and Locke, an 
abasement, and a depreciation of the idea of a 
"philosopher" for more than a century. It was 
against Hume that Kant uprose and raised him- 
self; it was Locke of whom Schelling rightly said, 
"/^ meprise Locke " ; in the struggle against the 
English mechanical stultification of the world, 
Hegel and Schopenhauer (along with Goethe) were 
of one accord ; the two hostile brother-geniuses 
in philosophy, who pushed in different directions 
towards the opposite poles of German thought, 
and thereby wronged each other as only brothers 
will do. — What is lacking in England, and has 
always been lacking, that half-actor and rhetori- 
cian knew well enough, the absurd muddle-head, 
Carlyle, who sought to conceal under passionate 
grimaces what he knew about himself: namely, 
what was lacking in Carlyle — real i)ower of in- 
tellect, real depth of intellectual perception, in 
short, philosophy. It is characteristic of such 
an unphilosophical race to hold on firmly to 
Christianity — they need its discipline for " moral- 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. 211 

ising" and humanising. The Englishman, more 
gloomy, sensual, headstrong, and brutal than the 
German — is for that very reason, as the baser of 
the two, also the most pious : he has all the more 
need of Christianity. To finer nostrils, this English 
Christianity itself has still a characteristic English 
taint of spleen and alcoholic excess, for which, 
owing to good reasons, it is used as an antidote — 
the finer poison to neutralise the coarser: a finer form 
of poisoning is in fact a step in advance with coarse- 
mannered people, a step towards spiritualisation. 
The English coarseness and rustic demureness 
is still most satisfactorily disguised by Christian 
pantomime, and by praying and psalm-singing 
(or, more correctly, it is thereby explained and 
differently expressed) ; and for the herd of drunkards 
and rakes who formerly learned moral grunting 
under the influence of Methodism (and more re- 
cently as the " Salvation Army "), a penitential fit 
may really be the relatively highest manifestation 
of " humanity '' to which they can be elevated : so 
much may reasonably be admitted. That, however, 
which offends even in the humanest Englishman is 
his lack of music, to speak figuratively (and also 
literally) : he has neither rhythm nor dance in the 
movements of his soul and body ; indeed, not even 
the desire for rhythm and dance, for *' music/' 
Listen to him speaking ; look at the most beautiful 
Englishwomen vjalking — in no country on earth 
are there more beautiful doves and swans ; finally, 
listen to them singing ! But I ask too much. . . . 



212 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. " 

253. 

There are truths which are best recognised by 
mediocre minds, because they are best adapted for 
them, there are truths which only possess charms 
and seductive power for mediocre spirits : — one is 
pushed to this probably unpleasant conclusion, now 
that the influence of respectable but mediocre 
Englishmen — I may mention Darwin, John Stuart 
Mill, and Herbert Spencer — begins to gain the 
ascendency in the middle-class region of Euro- 
pean taste. Indeed, who could doubt that it is 
a useful thing for such minds to have the ascend- 
ency for a time ? It would be an error to consider 
the highly developed and independently soaring 
minds as specially qualified for determining and 
collecting many little common facts, and deducing 
conclusions from them ; as exceptions, they are 
rather from the first in no very favourable position 
towards those who are " the rules." After all, they 
have more to do than merely to perceive : — ^^in 
effect, they have to be something new, they have to 
signify something new, they have to represent new 
values ! The gulf between knowledge and capacity 
is perhaps greater, and also more mysterious, than 
one thinks : the capable man in the grand style, 
the creator, will possibly have to be an ignorant 
person ; — while on the other hand, for scientific 
discoveries like those of Darwin, a certain narrow- 
ness, aridity, and industrious carefulness (in short 
something English) may not be unfavourable for 
arriving at them. — Finally, let it not be forgotten 
that the English, with their profound mediocrity, 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. 21 3 

brought about once before a general depression of 
European intelligence. What is called " modern 
ideas," or "the ideas of the eighteenth century," 
or "French ideas" — that, consequently, against 
which the German mind rose up with profound 
disgust — is of English origin, there is no doubt 
about it. The French were only the apes and actors 
of these ideas, their best soldiers, and likewise, alas ! 
their first and profoundest victims ; for owing to 
the diabolical Anglomania of " modern ideas," the 
dme franqais has in the end become so thin and 
emaciated, that at present one recalls its sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries, its profound, passionate 
strength, its inventive excellency, almost with dis- 
belief. One must, however, maintain this verdict of 
historical justice in a determined manner, and 
defend it against present prejudices and appear- 
ances : the European noblesse — of sentiment, taste, 
and manners, taking the word in every high sense, 
— is the work and invention of France ; the Euro- 
pean ignobleness, the plebeianism of modern ideas — 
is England's work and invention. 

254. 
Even at present France is still the seat of the most 
intellectual and refined culture of Europe, it is still 
the high school of taste ; but one must know how to 
find this " France of taste." He who belongs to it 
keeps himself well concealed : — they may be a 
small number in whom it lives and is embodied, be- 
sides perhaps being men who do not stand upon 
the strongest legs, in part fatalists, hypochondriacs, 
invalids, in part persons over-indulged, over-refined, 



214 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

such as have the ambition to conceal themselves. 
They have all something in common : they keep 
their ears closed in presence of the delirious folly 
and noisy spouting of the democratic bourgeois. 
In fact, a besotted and brutalised France at present 
sprawls in the foreground — it recently celebrated a 
veritable orgy of bad taste, and at the same time 
of self-admiration, at the funeral of Victor Hugo. 
There is also something else common to them : 
a predilection to resist intellectual Germanising 
— and a still greater inability to do so ! In this 
France of intellect, which is also a France of pessi- 
mism, Schopenhauer has perhaps become more at 
home, and more indigenous than he has ever been 
in Germany ; not to speak of Heinrich Heine, who 
has long ago been re-incarnated in the more re- 
fined and fastidious lyrists of Paris ; or of Hegel, 
who at present, in the form of Taine — the first of 
living historians — exercises an almost tyrannical 
influence. As regards Richard Wagner, however, 
the more French music learns to adapt itself to the 
actual needs of the ante moderney the more will it 
" Wagnerise " ; one can safely predict that before- 
hand, — it is already taking place sufficiently! There 
are, however, three things which the French can 
still boast of with pride as their heritage and pos- 
session, and as indelible tokens of their ancient 
intellectual superiority in Europe, in spite of all 
voluntary or involuntary Germanising and vulgar- 
ising of taste. Firstly^ the capacity for artistic 
emotion, for devotion to " form," for which the 
expression, Vart pour Part, along with numerous 
others, has been invented : — such capacity has 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. 215 

not been lacking in France for three centuries ; and 
owing to its reverence for the " small number," it 
has again and again made a sort of chamber music 
of literature possible, which is sought for in vain 
elsewhere in Europe. — The second thing whereby 
the French can lay claim to a superiority over 
Europe is their ancient, many-sided, moralistic 
culture, owing to which one finds on an average, 
even in the petty romanciers of the newspapers and 
chance boulevardiers de Paris, a psychological sensi- 
tiveness and curiosity, of which, for example, one 
has no conception (to say nothing of the thing 
itself !) in Germany. The Germans lack a couple 
of centuries of the moralistic work requisite thereto, 
which, as we have said, France has not grudged : 
those who call the Germans " naive " on that account 
give them commendation for a defect. (As the 
opposite of the German inexperience and inno- 
cence in voluptate psychologica, which is not too 
remotely associated with the tediousness of German 
intercourse, — and as the most successful expression 
of genuine French curiosity and inventive talent 
in this domain of delicate thrills, Henri Beyle may 
be noted ; that remarkable anticipatory and fore- 
running man, who, with a Napoleonic tempo, 
traversed his Europe, in fact, several centuries of 
the European soul, as a surveyor and discoverer 
thereof: — it has required two generations X.o over- 
take him one way or other, to divine long afterwards 
some of the riddles that perplexed and enraptured 
him — this strange Epicurean and man of interroga- 
tion, the last great psychologist of France). — There 
is yet a third claim to superiority : in the French 



2l6 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

character there is a successful half-way synthesis 
of the North and South, which makes them compre- 
hend many things, and enjoins upon them other 
things, which an Englishman can never compre- 
hend. Their temperament, turned alternately to 
and from the South, in which from time to time the 
Provencal and Ligurian blood froths over, preserves 
them from the dreadful, northern gray-in-gray, 
from sunless conceptual-spectrism and from poverty 
of blood — our German infirmity of taste, for the 
excessive prevalence of which at the present 
moment, blood and iron, that is to say "high 
politics," has with great resolution been prescribed 
(according to a dangerous healing art, which bids 
me wait and wait, but not yet hope). — There is 
also still in France a pre-understanding and ready 
welcome for those rarer and rarely gratified men, 
who are too comprehensive to find satisfaction in 
any kind of fatherlandism, and know how to love 
the South when in the North and the North when 
in the South — the born Midlanders, the " good 
Europeans." For them Bizet has made music, 
this latest genius, who has seen a new beauty and 
seduction, — who has discovered a piece of the 
South in music. 

255. 

I hold that many precautions should be taken 
against German music. Suppose a person loves 
the South as I love it — as a great school of recovery 
for the most spiritual and the most sensuous ills, 
as a boundless solar profusion and effulgence which 
overspreads a sovereign existence believing in itself 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. 217 

— well, such a person will learn to be somewhat on 
his guard against German music, because, in injuring 
his taste anew, it will also injure his health anew. 
Such a Southerner, a Southerner not by origin but 
by beliefs if he should dream of the future of music, 
must also dream of it being freed from the influence 
of the North ; and must have in his ears the pre- 
lude to a deeper, mightier, and perhaps more per- 
verse and mysterious music, a super-German music, 
which does not fade, pale, and die away, as all 
German music does, at the sight of the blue, wanton 
sea and the Mediterranean clearness of sky — a 
super-European music, which holds its own even in 
presence of the brown sunsets of the desert, whose 
soul is akin to the palm-tree, and can be at home 
and can roam with big, beautiful, lonely beasts 
of prey. ... I could imagine a music of which the 
rarest charm would be that it knew nothing more 
of good and evil ; only that here and there perhaps 
some sailor's home-sickness, some golden shadows 
and tender weaknesses might sweep lightly over 
it ; an art which, from the far distance, would see 
the colours of a sinking and almost incomprehen- 
sible moral world fleeing towards it, and would be 
hospitable enough and profound enough to receive 
such belated fugitives, 

256. 
Owing to the morbid estrangement which the 
nationality-craze has induced and still induces 
among the nations of Europe, owing also to the 
short-sighted and hasty-handed politicians, who 
with the help of this craze, are at present in power, 



2l8 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

and do not suspect to what extent the disinte- 
grating policy they pursue must necessarily be only 
an interlude policy — owing to all this, and much 
else that is altogether unmentionable at present, 
the most unmistakable signs that Europe wishes to 
be one^ are now overlooked, or arbitrarily and falsely 
misinterpreted. With all the more profound and 
large-minded men of this century, the real general 
tendency of the mysterious labour of their souls 
was to prepare the way for that new synthesis^ 
and tentatively to anticipate the European of the 
future ; only in their simulations, or in their weaker 
moments, in old age perhaps, did they belong to 
the "fatherlands" — they only rested from them- 
selves when they became "patriots." I think of such 
men as Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, 
Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer: it must not be 
taken amiss if I also count Richard Wagner among 
them, about whom one must not let oneself be de- 
ceived by his own misunderstandings (geniuses like 
him have seldom the right to understand them- 
selves), still less, of course, by the unseemly noise 
with which he is now resisted and opposed in 
France : the fact remains, nevertheless, that Richard 
Wagner and the later French Romanticism of the 
forties, are most closely and intimately related to 
one another. They are akin, fundamentally akin, 
in all the heights and depths of their requirements ; 
it is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul presses 
urgently and longingly, outwards and upwards, in 
their multifarious and boisterous art — whither? 
into a new light ? towards a new sun ? But who 
would attempt to express accurately what all these 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. 219 

masters of new modes of speech could not express 
distinctly? It is certain that the same storm and 
stress tormented them, that they sought in the 
same manner, these last great seekers ! All of 
them steeped in literature to their eyes and ears 
— the first artists of universal literary culture — for 
the most part even themselves writers, poets, inter- 
mediaries and blenders of the arts and the senses 
(Wagner, as musician is reckoned among painters, 
as poet among musicians, as artist generally among 
actors) ; all of them fanatics for expression " at any 
cost " — I specially mention Delacroix, the nearest 
related to Wagner; all of them great discoverers 
in the realm of the sublime, also of the loathsome 
and dreadful, still greater discoverers in effect, in 
display, in the art of the show-shop ; all of them 
talented far beyond their genius, out and out virtuosi^ 
with mysterious accesses to all that seduces, allures, 
constrains, and upsets ; born enemies of logic and 
of the straight line, hankering after the strange, 
the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, and the 
self-contradictory ; as men. Tantaluses of the will, 
plebeian parvenus, who knew themselves to be 
incapable of a noble tempo or of a lento in life and 
action — think of Balzac, for instance, — unrestrained 
workers, almost destroying themselves by work ; 
antinomians and rebels in manners, ambitious and 
insatiable, without equilibrium and enjoyment ; all 
of them finally shattering and sinking down at the 
Christian cross (and with right and reason, for who 
of them would have been sufficiently profound and 
sufficiently original for an Antichrisiian philo- 
sophy ?) ; — on the whole, a boldly daring, splendidly 



220 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

overbearing, high-flying, and aloft-up-dragging 
class of higher men, who had first to teach their 
century — and it is the century of the masses — the 
conception "higher man." . . . Let the German 
friends of Richard Wagner advise together as to 
whether there is anything purely German in the 
Wagnerian art, or whether its distinction does not 
consist precisely in coming from super-German 
sources and impulses : in which connection it may 
not be underrated how indispensable Paris was to 
the development of his type, which the strength of 
his instincts made him long to visit at the most 
decisive time — and how the whole style of his pro- 
ceedings, of his self-apostolate, could only perfect 
itself in sight of the French socialistic original. On 
a more subtle comparison it will perhaps be found, 
to the honour of Richard Wagner's German nature, 
that he has acted in everything with more strength, 
daring, severity, and elevation than a nineteenth- 
century Frenchman could have done — owing to 
the circumstance that we Germans are as yet 
nearer to barbarism than the French ; — perhaps 
even the most remarkable creation of Richard 
Wagner is not only at present, but for ever inac- 
cessible, incomprehensible, and inimitable to the 
whole latter-day Latin race : the figure of Sieg- 
fried, that very free man, who is probably far too 
free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too anti- 
Catholic for the taste of old and mellow civilised 
nations. He may even have been a sin against 
Romanticism, this an ti- Latin Siegfried : well, 
Wagner atoned amply for this sin in his old sad 
days, when — anticipating a taste which has mean- 



PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES. 221 

while passed into politics — he began, with the 
religious vehemence peculiar to him, to preach, at 
least, the way to Rome^ if not to walk therein. — 
That these last words may not be misunderstood, 
I will call to my aid a few powerful rhymes, which 
will even betray to less delicate ears what I mean 
— what I mean counter to the " last Wagner " and 
his Parsifal music : — 

— Is this our mode ? — 

From German heart came this vexed ululating? 
From German body, this self-lacerating ? 
Is ours this priestly hand-dilation, 
This incense-fuming exaltation ? 
Is ours this faltering, falling, shambling. 
This quite uncertain ding-dong-dangling? 
This sly nun-ogling, Ave-hour-bell ringing. 
This wholly false enraptured heaven-o'erspringing ? 
— Is this our mode ? — 
Think well ! — ye still wait for admission — 
For what ye hear is Rome — Rome's faith by in- 
tuition I 



NINTH CHAPTER. 
WHAT IS NOBLE? 

257. 

Every elevation of the type " man," has hitherto 
been the work of an aristocratic society — and so 
will it always be — a society believing in a long 
scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth 
among human beings, and requiring slavery in 
some form or other. Without ^^ pathos of distance^ 
such as grows out of the incarnated difference of 
classes, out of the constant outlooking and down- 
looking of the ruling caste on subordinates and 
instruments, and out of their equally constant 
practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping 
down and keeping at a distance — that other more 
mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the 
longing for an ever new widening of distance within 
the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, 
further, more extended, more comprehensive states, 
in short, just the elevation of the type " man," the 
continued "self-surmounting of man," to use a 
moral formula in a supermoral sense. To be sure, 
one must not resign oneself to any humanitarian 
illusions about the history of the origin of an aristo- 
cratic society (that is to say, of the preliminary 



224 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

condition for the elevation of the type "man"): 
the truth is hard. Let us acknowledge un- 
prejudicedly how every higher civilisation hitherto 
has originated! Men with a still natural nature, 
barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men 
of prey, still in possession of unbroken strength of 
will and desire for power, threw themselves upon 
weaker, more moral, more peaceful races (perhaps 
trading or cattle-rearing communities), or upon old 
mellow civilisations in which the final vital force 
was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and 
depravity. At the commencement, the noble caste 
was always the barbarian caste : their superiority 
did not consist first of all in their physical, but in 
their psychical power — they were more complete 
men (which at every point also implies the same 
as " more complete beasts "), 

258. 
Corruption — as the indication that anarchy 
threatens to break out among the instincts, and 
that the foundation of the emotions, called " life," 
is convulsed — is something radically different ac- 
cording to the organisation in which it manifests 
itself. When, for instance, an aristocracy like that 
of France at the beginning of the Revolution, flung 
away its privileges with sublime disgust and 
sacrificed itself to an excess of its moral sentiments, 
it was corruption : — it was really only the closing 
act of the corruption which had existed for cen- 
turies, by virtue of which that aristocracy had 
abdicated step by step its lordly prerogatives and 
lowered itself to a function of royalty (in the end 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 225 

even to its decoration and parade-dress). The 
essential thing, however, in a good and healthy 
aristocracy is that it should not regard itself as a 
function either of the kingship or the commonwealth, 
but as the significance and highest justification 
thereof — that it should therefore accept with a good 
conscience the sacrifice of a legion of individuals, 
who,/"^r its sakcy must be suppressed and reduced 
to imperfect men, to slaves and instruments. Its 
fundamental belief must be precisely that society is 
not allowed to exist for its own sake, but only as a 
foundation and scaffolding, by means of which a 
select class of beings may be able to elevate them- 
selves to their higher duties, and in general to a 
higher existence: like those sun-seeking climbing 
plants in Java — they are called Sipo Matador, — 
which encircle an oak so long and so often with 
their arms, until at last, high above it, but supported 
by it, they can unfold their tops in the open light, 
and exhibit their happiness. 

259. 

To refrain mutually from injury, from violence, 
from exploitation, and put one's will on a par with 
that of others : this may result in a certain rough 
sense in good conduct among individuals when the 
necessary conditions are given (namely, the actual 
similarity of the individuals in amount of force and 
degree of worth, and their co-relation within one 
organisation). As soon, however, as one wished to 
take this principle more generally, and if possible 
even as the fundamental principle of society, it would 
immediately disclose what it really is — namely, a 

P 



226 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 

Will to the denial of life, a principle of dissolution 
and decay. Here one must think profoundly to 
the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness : 
life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, con- 
quest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, 
obtrusion of its own forms, incorporation, and at 
the least, putting it mildest, exploitation ; — but 
why should one for ever use precisely these words 
on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been 
stamped ? Even the organisation within which, as 
was previously supposed, the individuals treat each 
other as equal — it takes place in every healthy 
aristocracy — must itself, if it be a living and not a 
dying organisation, do all that towards other bodies, 
which the individuals within it refrain from doing 
to each other: it will have to be the incarnated 
Will to Power, it will endeavour to grow, to gain 
ground, attract to itself and acquire ascendency — 
not owing to any morality or immorality, but 
because it lives^ and because life is precisely Will to 
Power. On no point, however, is the ordinary 
consciousness of Europeans more unwilling to be 
corrected than on this matter ; people now rave 
everywhere, even under the guise of science, about 
coming conditions of society in which " the exploit- 
ing character " is to be absent : — that sounds to my 
ears as if they promised to invent a mode of life 
which should refrain from all organic functions. 
" Exploitation " does not belong to a depraved, or 
imperfect and primitive society ; it belongs to the 
nature of the living being as a primary organic 
function ; it is a consequence of the intrinsic Will 
to Power, which is precisely the Will to Life. — 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 22/ 

Granting that as a theory this is a novelty — as a 
reality it is \}ii^ fundamental fact of all history : let 
us be so far honest towards ourselves ! 

260. 
In a tour through the many finer and coarser 
moralities which have hitherto prevailed or still 
prevail on the earth, I found certain traits recurring 
regularly together, and connected with one another, 
until finally two primary types revealed themselves 
to me, and a radical distinction was brought to 
light. There is master-morality and slave-morality ; 
— I would at once add, however, that in all higher 
and mixed civilisations, there are also attempts at 
the reconciliation of the two moralities ; but one 
finds still oftener the confusion and mutual mis- 
understanding of them, indeed, sometimes their 
close juxtaposition — even in the same man, within 
one soul. The distinctions of moral values have 
either originated in a ruling caste, pleasantly con- 
scious of being different from the ruled — or among 
the ruled class, the slaves and dependents of all sorts. 
In the first case, when it is the rulers who deter- 
mine the conception "good," it is the exalted, 
proud disposition which is regarded as the distin- 
guishing feature, and that which determines the 
order of rank. The noble type of man separates 
from himself the beings in whom the opposite of 
this exalted, proud disposition displays itself: he 
despises them. Let it at once be noted that in 
this first kind of morality the antithesis " good " and 
" bad " means practically the same as " noble " and 
" despicable ";— the antithesis "good" and '' eviV' 



228 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

IS of a different origin. The cowardly, the timid, 
the insignificant, and those thinking merely of 
narrow utility are despised ; moreover, also, the 
distrustful, with their constrained glances, the self- 
abasing, the dog-like kind of men who let them- 
selves be abused, the mendicant flatterers, and 
above all the liars : — it is a fundamental belief of 
all aristocrats that the common people are untruth- 
ful. " We truthful ones " — the nobility in ancient 
Greece called themselves. It is obvious that every- 
where the designations of moral value were at first 
applied to men, and were only derivatively and at 
a later period applied to actions ; it is a gross mis- 
take, therefore, when historians of morals start with 
questions like, "Why have sympathetic actions 
been praised?" The noble type of man regards 
himself as a determiner of values ; he does not 
require to be approved of; he passes the judgment : 
"What is injurious to me is injurious in itself"; he 
knows that it is he himself only who confers 
honour on things ; he is a creator of values. He 
honours whatever he recognises in himself: such 
morality is self-glorification. In the foreground 
there is the feeling of plenitude, of power, which 
seeks to overflow, the happiness of high tension, 
the consciousness of a wealth which would fain 
give and bestow : — the noble man also helps the 
unfortunate, but not — or scarcely — out of pity, but 
rather from an impulse generated by the super- 
abundance of power. The noble man honours in 
himself the powerful one, him also who has power 
over himself, who knows how to speak and how 
to keep silence, who takes pleasure in subjecting 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 229 

himself to severity and hardness, and has reverence 
for all that is severe and hard. " Wotan placed a 
hard heart in my breast," says an old Scandinavian 
Saga : it is thus rightly expressed from the soul of 
a proud Viking. Such a type of man is even proud 
of not being made for sympathy ; the hero of the 
Saga therefore adds warningly : " He who has not 
a hard heart when young, will never have one." 
The noble and brave who think thus are the furthest 
removed from the morality which sees precisely in 
sympathy, or in acting for the good of others, or in 
desinteresse^nent^ the characteristic of the moral ; 
faith in oneself, pride in oneself, a radical enmity 
and irony towards "selflessness," belong as definitely 
to noble morality, as do a careless scorn and pre- 
caution in presence of sympathy and the " warm 
heart." — It is the powerful who know how to 
honour, it is their art, their domain for invention. 
The profound reverence for age and for tradition — 
all law rests on this double reverence, — the belief 
and prejudice in favour of ancestors and unfavour- 
able to newcomers, is typical in the morality of the 
powerful ; and if, reversely, men of " modern ideas " 
believe almost instinctively in " progress " and the 
" future," and are more and more lacking in respect 
for old age, the ignoble origin of these " ideas " has 
complacently betrayed itself thereby. A morality 
of the ruling class, however, is more especially 
foreign and irritating to present-day taste in the 
sternness of its principle that one has duties only 
to one's equals ; that one may act towards beings 
of a lower rank, towards all that is foreign, just as 
seems good to one, or " as the heart desires," and 



230 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

in any case " beyond good and evil " : it is here 
that sympathy and similar sentiments can have a 
place. The ability and obligation to exercise pro- 
longed gratitude and prolonged revenge — both 
only within the circle of equals, — artfulness in 
retaliation, raffinement of the idea in friendship, a 
certain necessity to have enemies (as outlets for the 
emotions of envy, quarrelsomeness, arrogance — in 
fact, in order to be a good friend) : all these are 
typical characteristics of the noble morality, which, 
as has been pointed out, is not the morality of 
" modern ideas," and is therefore at present difficult 
to realise, and also to unearth and disclose. — It is 
otherwise with the second type of morality, slave- 
morality. Supposing that the abused, the op- 
pressed, the suffering, the unemancipated, the weary, 
and those uncertain of themselves, should moralise, 
what will be the common element in their moral 
estimates ? Probably a pessimistic suspicion with 
regard to the entire situation of man will find 
expression, perhaps a condemnation of man, to- 
gether with his situation. The slave has an un- 
favourable eye for the virtues of the powerful ; he 
has a scepticism and distrust, a refinement of distrust 
of everything " good " that is there honoured — he 
would fain persuade himself that the very happi- 
ness there is not genuine. On the other hand, those 
qualities which serve to alleviate the existence of 
sufferers are brought into prominence and flooded 
with light ; it is here that sympathy, the kind, 
helping hand, the warm heart, patience, diligence, 
humility, and friendliness attain to honour ; for 
here these are the most useful qualities, and almost 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 23 1 

the only means of supporting the burden of exist- 
ence. Slave-morality is essentially the morality of 
utility. Here is the seat of the origin of the famous 
antithesis "good " and '' eviV : — power and danger- 
ousness are assumed to reside in the evil, a certain 
dreadfulness, subtlety, and strength, which do not 
admit of being despised. According to slave- 
morality, therefore, the "evil" man arouses fear; 
according to master-morality, it is precisely the 
"good" man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse 
it, while the bad man is regarded as the despicable 
being. The contrast attains its maximum when, 
in accordance with the logical consequences of 
slave-morality, a shade of depreciation — it may be 
slight and well-intentioned — at last attaches itself 
even to the " good " man of this morality ; because, 
according to the servile mode of thought, the good 
man must in any case be the safe man : he is good- 
natured, easily deceived, perhaps a little stupid, un 
bonhomme. Everywhere that slave-morality gains 
the ascendency, language shows a tendency to 
approximate the significations of the words " good " 
and " stupid." — A last fundamental difference : the 
desire for freedom, the instinct for happiness and 
the refinements of the feeling of liberty belong as 
necessarily to slave-morals and morality, as artifice 
and enthusiasm in reverence and devotion are the 
regular symptoms of an aristocratic mode of think- 
ing and estimating. — Hence we can understand 
without further detail why love as a passion — it is 
our European speciality — must absolutely be of 
noble origin ; as is well known, its invention is 
due to the Provengal poet-cavaliers, those brilliant 



232 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

ingenious men of the ^^ gai saber'* to whom Europe 
owes so much, and almost owes itself. 

261. 
Vanity is one of the things which are perhaps 
most difficult for a noble man to understand : he 
will be tempted to deny it, where another kind of 
man thinks he sees it self-evidently. The problem 
for him is to represent to his mind beings who seek 
to arouse a good opinion of themselves which they 
themselves do not possess — and consequently also 
do not ** deserve," — and who yet believe in this good 
opinion afterwards. This seems to him on the one 
hand such bad taste and so self-disrespectful, and 
on the other hand so grotesquely unreasonable, 
that he would like to consider vanity an excep- 
tion, and is doubtful about it in most cases when 
it is spoken of He will say, for instance : " I 
may be mistaken about my value, and on the 
other hand may nevertheless demand that my value 
should be acknowledged by others precisely as 
I rate it: — that, however, is not vanity (but 
self-conceit, or, in most cases, that which is called 
'humility,' and also 'modesty')." Or he will 
even say: **For many reasons I can delight in 
the good opinion of others, perhaps because I 
love and honour them, and rejoice in all their joys, 
perhaps also because their good opinion endorses 
and strengthens my belief in my own good opinion, 
perhaps because the good opinion of others, even 
in cases where I do not share it, is useful to me, 
or gives promise of usefulness : — all this, however, 
is not vanity." The man of noble character must 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 233 

first bring it home forcibly to his mind, especially 
with the aid of history, that, from time immemorial, 
in all social strata in any way dependent, the 
ordinary man was only that which \i^ passed for : — 
not being at all accustomed to fix values, he did 
not assign even to himself any other value than 
that which his master assigned to him (it is the 
peculiar right of masters to create values). It may 
be looked upon as the result of an extraordinary 
atavism, that the ordinary man, even at present, is 
still always waiting for an opinion about himself, 
and then instinctively submitting himself to it ; 
yet by no means only to a " good " opinion, but 
also to a bad and unjust one (think, for instance, 
of the greater part of the self-appreciations and 
self-depreciations which believing women learn 
from their confessors, and which in general the 
believing Christian learns from his Church). In 
fact, conformably to the slow rise of the democratic 
social order (and its cause, the blending of the 
blood of masters and slaves), the originally noble 
and rare impulse of the masters to assign a value 
to themselves and to " think well '' of themselves, 
will now be more and more encouraged and ex- 
tended ; but it has at all times an older, ampler, 
and more radically ingrained propensity opposed 
to it — and in the phenomenon of "vanity" this 
older propensity overmasters the younger. The 
vain person rejoices over every good opinion which 
he hears about himself (quite apart from the point 
of view of its usefulness, and equally regardless of 
its truth or falsehood), just as he suffers from every 
bad opinion : for he subjects himself to both, he 



234 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

feels himself subjected to both, by that oldest in- 
stinct of subjection which breaks forth in him. — 
It is " the slave " in the vain man's blood, the re- 
mains of the slave's craftiness — and how much of 
the " slave " is still left in woman, for instance ! — 
which seeks to seduce to good opinions of itself; 
it is the slave, too, who immediately afterwards 
falls prostrate himself before these opinions, as 
though he had not called them forth. — And to 
repeat it again : vanity is an atavism. 

262e 

A species originates, and a type becomes estab- 
lished and strong in the long struggle with essen- 
tially constant unfavourable conditions. On the 
other hand, it is known by the experience of 
breeders that species which receive superabundant 
nourishment, and in general a surplus of protection 
and care, immediately tend in the most marked 
way to develop variations, and are fertile in pro- 
digies and monstrosities (also in monstrous vices). 
Now look at an aristocratic commonwealth, say 
an ancient Greek polis^ or Venice, as a voluntary 
or involuntary contrivance for the purpose of rear- 
ing human beings ; there are there men beside 
one another, thrown upon their own resources, 
who want to make their species prevail, chiefly 
because they must prevail, or else run the terrible 
danger of being exterminated. The favour, the 
superabundance, the protection are there lacking 
under which variations are fostered ; the species 
needs itself as species, as something which, pre- 
cisely by virtue of its hardness, its uniformity, and 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 235 

simplicity of structure, can in general prevail and 
make itself permanent in constant struggle with 
its neighbours, or with rebellious or rebellion- 
threatening vassals. The most varied experience 
teaches it what are the qualities to which it princi- 
pally owes the fact that it still exists, in spite of 
all Gods and men, and has hitherto been victorious : 
these qualities it calls virtues, and these virtues 
alone it develops to maturity. It does so with 
severity, indeed it desires severity ; every aristo- 
cratic morality is intolerant in the education of 
youth, in the control of women, in the marriage 
customs, in the relations of old and young, in the 
penal laws (which have an eye only for the de- 
generating) : it counts intolerance itself among the 
virtues, under the name of "justice/* A type with 
few, but very marked features, a species of severe, 
warlike, wisely silent, reserved and reticent men 
(and as such, with the most delicate sensibility for 
the charm and nuances of society) is thus estab- 
lished, unaffected by the vicissitudes of generations ; 
the constant struggle with uniform unfavourable 
conditions is, as already remarked, the cause of a 
type becoming stable and hard. Finally, however, 
a happy state of things results, the enormous 
tension is relaxed ; there are perhaps no more 
enemies among the neighbouring peoples, and the 
means of life, even of the enjoyment of life, are 
present in superabundance. With one stroke the 
bond and constraint of the old discipline severs : 
it is no longer regarded as necessary, as a condition 
of existence — if it would continue, it can only do so 
as a form of luxury, as an archaising taste, Varia- 



236 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

tions, whether they be deviations (into the higher, 
finer, and rarer), or deteriorations and monstrosities, 
appear suddenly on the scene in the greatest exuber- 
ance and splendour ; the individual dares to be 
individual and detach himself. At this turning- 
point of history there manifest themselves, side 
by side, and often mixed and entangled together, 
a magnificent, manifold, virgin - forest - like up- 
growth and up-striving, a kind of tropical tempo in 
the rivalry of growth, and an extraordinary decay 
and self-destruction, owing to the savagely oppos- 
ing and seemingly exploding egoisms, which strive 
with one another " for sun and light," and can no 
longer assign any limit, restraint, or forbearance 
for themselves by means of the hitherto existing 
morality. It was this morality itself which piled 
up the strength so enormously, which bent the bow 
in so threatening a manner : — it is now " out of 
date," it is getting "out of date." The dan- 
gerous and disquieting point has been reached 
when the greater, more manifold, more compre- 
hensive life is lived beyond the old morality ; the 
"individual" stands out, and is obliged to have 
recourse to his own law-giving, his own arts and 
artifices for self-preservation, self-elevation, and 
self-deliverance. Nothing but new "Whys," nothing 
but new " Hows," no common formulas any longer, 
misunderstanding and disregard in league with 
each other, decay, deterioration, and the loftiest 
desires frightfully entangled, the genius of the race 
overflowing from all the cornucopias of good and 
bad, a portentous simultaneousness of Spring and 
Autumn, full of new charms and mysteries peculiar 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 237 

to the fresh, still inexhausted, still unwearied cor- 
ruption. Danger is again present, the mother of 
morality, great danger ; this time shifted into the 
individual, into the neighbour and friend, into the 
street, into their own child, into their own heart, 
into all the most personal and secret recesses of 
their desires and volitions. What will the moral 
philosophers who appear at this time have to 
preach ? They discover, these sharp onlookers and 
loafers, that the end is quickly approaching, that 
everything around them decays and produces 
decay, that nothing will endure until the day after 
to-morrow, except one species of man, the incur- 
ably mediocre. The mediocre alone have a pro- 
spect of continuing and propagating themselves — 
they will be the men of the future, the sole sur- 
vivors ; " be like them ! become mediocre ! " is now 
the only morality which has still a significance, 
which still obtains a hearing. — But it is difficult to 
preach this morality of mediocrity! it can never 
avow what it is and what it desires ! it has to talk 
of moderation and dignity and duty and brotherly 
love — it will have difficulty in concealing its 
irony ! 

263. 

There is an instinct for rank^ which more than 
anything else is already the sign of a high rank ; 
there is a delight in the nuances of reverence which 
leads one to infer noble origin and habits. The 
refinement, goodness, and loftiness of a soul are 
put to a perilous test when something passes by 
that is of the highest rank, but is not yet pro- 



238 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

tected by the awe of authority from obtrusive 
touches and incivilities : something that goes its 
way like a living touchstone, undistinguished, un- 
discovered, and tentative, perhaps voluntarily veiled 
and disguised. He whose task and practice it is 
to investigate souls, will avail himself of many 
varieties of this very art to determine the ultimate 
value of a soul, the unalterable, innate order of rank 
to which it belongs : he will test it by its instinct for 
reverence. Difference engendre haine : the vulgarity 
of many a nature spurts up suddenly like dirty 
water, when any holy vessel, any jewel from closed 
shrines, any book bearing the marks of great 
destiny, is brought before it ; while on the other 
hand, there is an involuntary silence, a hesitation of 
the eye, a cessation of all gestures, by which it is 
indicated that a soul feels the nearness of what is 
worthiest of respect. The way in which, on the 
whole, the reverence for the Bible has hitherto been 
maintained in Europe, is perhaps the best example 
of discipline and refinement of manners which 
Europe owes to Christianity : books of such pro- 
foundness and supreme significance require for 
their protection an external tyranny of authority, 
in order to acquire XhQ period of thousands of years 
which is necessary to exhaust and unriddle them. 
Much has been achieved when the sentiment has 
been at last instilled into the masses (the shallow- 
pates and the boobies of every kind) that they are 
not allowed to touch everything, that there are 
holy experiences before which they must take off 
their shoes and keep away the unclean hand — it is 
almost their highest advance towards humanity. 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 239 

On the contrary, in the so-called cultured classes, 
the believers in " modern ideas," nothing is perhaps 
so repulsive as their lack of shame, the easy inso- 
lence of eye and hand with which they touch, 
taste, and finger everything ; and it is possible that 
even yet there is more relative nobility of taste, and 
more tact for reverence among the people, among 
the lower classes of the people, especially among 
peasants, than among the newspaper-reading demi- 
monde of intellect, the cultured class. 

264. 

It cannot be effaced from a man's soul what his 
ancestors have preferably and most constantly 
done : whether they were perhaps diligent econo- 
misers attached to a desk and a cash-box, modest 
and citizen-like in their desires, modest also in their 
virtues ; or whether they were accustomed to com- 
manding from morning till night, fond of rude 
pleasures and probably of still ruder duties and 
responsibilities ; or whether, finally, at one time or 
another, they have sacrificed old privileges of 
birth and possession, in order to live wholly for 
their faith — for their " God," — as men of an inexor- 
able and sensitive conscience, which blushes at 
every compromise. It is quite impossible for a 
man not to have the qualities and predilections of 
his parents and ancestors in his constitution, what- 
ever appearances may suggest to the contrary. 
This is the problem of race. Granted that one 
knows something of the parents, it is admissible 
to draw a conclusion about the child : any kind of 
offensive incontinence, any kind of sordid envy, or 



240 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

of clumsy self-vaimting — the three things which 
together have constituted the genuine plebeian 
type in all times — such must pass over to the 
child, as surely as bad blood ; and with the help of 
the best education and culture one will only suc- 
ceed in deceiving with regard to such heredity. — 
And what else does education and culture try to 
do nowadays ! In our very democratic, or rather, 
very plebeian age, " education " and '* culture " must 
be essentially the art of deceiving — deceiving with 
regard to origin, with regard to the inherited 
plebeianism in body and soul. An educator who 
nowadays preached truthfulness above everything 
else, and called out constantly to his pupils : " Be 
true ! Be natural ! Show yourselves as you are ! " — 
even such a virtuous and sincere ass would learn in 
a short time to have recourse to \}i\^fMrca of Horace, 
naturam expellere : with what results? "Plebeianism" 
usque recurreU^ 

265. 

At the risk of displeasing innocent ears, I sub- 
mit that egoism belongs to the essence of a noble 
soul, I mean the unalterable belief that to a being 
such as "we," other beings must naturally be in 
subjection, and have to sacrifice themselves. The 
noble soul accepts the fact of his egoism without 
question, and also without consciousness of harsh- 
ness, constraint, or arbitrariness therein, but rather 
as something that may have its basis in the primary 
law of things : — if he sought a designation for it 

* Horace's " Epistles," I. x. 24. 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 24I 

he would say: "It is justice itself." He ac- 
knowledges under certain circumstances, which 
made him hesitate at first, that there are other 
equally privileged ones ; as soon as he has settled 
this question of rank, he moves among those equals 
and equally privileged ones with the same assur- 
ance, as regards modesty and delicate respect, 
which he enjoys in intercourse with himself — in 
accordance with an innate heavenly mechanism 
which all the stars understand. It is an additional 
instance of his egoism, this artfulness and self- 
limitation in intercourse with his equals — every 
star is a similar egoist ; he honours himself in them, 
and in the rights which he concedes to them, he 
has no doubt that the exchange of honours and 
rights, as the essence of all intercourse, belongs also 
to the natural condition of things. The noble 
soul gives as he takes, prompted by the passionate 
and sensitive instinct of requital, which is at the 
root of his nature. The notion of " favour " has, 
inter pareSy neither significance nor good repute ; 
there may be a sublime way of letting gifts as it 
were light upon one from above, and of drinking 
them thirstily like dew-drops ; but for those arts 
and displays the noble soul has no aptitude. His 
egoism hinders him here: in general, he looks 
"aloft" unwillingly — he looks either forward, 
horizontally and deliberately, or downwards— //i? 
knows that he is on a height, 

266. 
" One can only truly esteem him who does not 
look out for himself." — Goethe to Rath Schlosser. 

Q 



242 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

267. 

The Chinese have a proverb which mothers even 
teach their children : " Siao-sin " (" make thy heart 
smair'). This is the essentially fundamental 
tendency in latter-day civilisations. I have no 
doubt that an ancient Greek, also, would first of 
all remark the self-dwarfing in us Europeans of to- 
day — in this respect alone we should immediately 
be " distasteful " to him. 

268. 

What, after all, is ignobleness? — Words are 
vocal symbols for ideas ; ideas, however, are more 
or less definite mental symbols for frequently re- 
turning and concurring sensations, for groups of 
sensations. It is not sufficient to use the same 
words in order to understand one another : we must 
also employ the same words for the same kind of 
internal experiences, we must in the end have ex- 
periences in common. On this account the people 
of one nation understand one another better than 
those belonging to different nations, even when 
they use the same language ; or rather, when people 
have lived long together under similar conditions 
(of climate, soil, danger, requirement, toil) there 
originates therefrom an entity that "understands 
itself" — namely, a nation. In all souls a like 
number of frequently recurring experiences have 
gained the upper hand over those occurring more 
rarely : about these matters people understand one 
another rapidly and always more rapidly — the 
history of language is the history of a process of 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 243 

abbreviation; on the basis of this quick com- 
prehension people always unite closer and closer. 
The greater the danger, the greater is the need 
of agreeing quickly and readily about what is 
necessary ; not to misunderstand one another in 
danger — that is what cannot at all be dispensed 
with in intercourse. Also in all loves and friend- 
ships one has the experience that nothing of the 
kind continues when the discovery has been made 
that in using the same words, one of the two parties 
has feelings, thoughts, intuitions, wishes, or fears 
different from those of the other. (The fear of the 
"eternal misunderstanding"; that is the good genius 
which so often keeps persons of different sexes from 
too hasty attachments, to which sense and heart 
prompt them — and not some Schopenhauerian 
" genius of the species " !). Whichever groups of 
sensations within a soul awaken most readily, 
begin to speak, and give the word of command — 
these decide as to the general order of rank of its 
values, and determine ultimately its list of desirable 
things. A man's estimates of value betray some- 
thing of the structure of his soul, and wherein it 
sees its conditions of life, its intrinsic needs. Sup- 
posing now that necessity has from all time drawn 
together only such men as could express similar 
requirements and similar experiences by similar 
symbols, it results on the whole that the easy 
communicability of need, which implies ultimately 
the undergoing only of average and commojt ex- 
periences, must have been the most potent of all 
the forces which have hitherto operated upon man- 
kind. The more similar, the more ordinary people, 



244 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

have always had and are still having the advantage ; 
the more select, more refined, more unique, and 
difficultly comprehensible, are liable to stand alone; 
they succumb to accidents in their isolation, and 
seldom propagate themselves. One must appeal 
to immense opposing forces, in order to thwart this 
natural, all-too-natural progressus in simile^ the 
evolution of man to the similar, the ordinary, the 
average, the gregarious — to the ignoble ! — 

269. 
The more a psychologist — a born, an unavoidable 
psychologist and soul-diviner — turns his attention 
to the more select cases and individuals, the greater 
is his danger of being suffocated by sympathy : he 
;^^^^i"sternness and cheerfulness more than anyother 
man. For the corruption, the ruination of higher 
men, of the more unusually constituted souls, is in 
fact, the rule : it is dreadful to have such a rule 
always before one's eyes. The manifold torment 
of the psychologist who has discovered this ruina- 
tion, who discovers once, and then discovers almost 
repeatedly throughout all history, this universal 
inner " desperateness " of higher men, this eternal 
"too late!" in every sense — may perhaps one day 
be the cause of his turning with bitterness against 
his own lot, and of his making an attempt at self- 
destruction — of his " going to ruin '' himself One 
may perceive in almost every psychologist a tell- 
tale inclination for delightful intercourse with 
commonplace and well-ordered men : the fact is 
thereby disclosed that he always requires healing, 
that he needs a sort of flight and forgetfulness, 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 245 

away from what his insight and incisiveness — from 
what his " business '' — has laid upon his conscience. 
The fear of his memory is peculiar to him. He is 
easily silenced by the judgment of others ; he hears 
with unmoved countenance how people honour, 
admire, love, and glorify, where he has perceived — or 
he even conceals his silence by expressly assenting 
to some plausible opinion. Perhaps the paradox of 
his situation becomes so dreadful that, precisely 
where he has learnt great sympathy, together with 
great contempt, the multitude, the educated, and the 
visionaries, have on their part learnt great reverence 
— reverence for " great men " and marvellous 
animals, for the sake of whom one blesses and 
honours the fatherland, the earth, the dignity of 
mankind, and one's own self, to whom one points 
the young, and in view of whom one educates them. 
And who knows but in all great instances hitherto 
just the same happened : that the multitude wor- 
shipped a God, and that the " God " was only a 
poor sacrificial animal ! Success has always been 
the greatest liar — and the " work " itself is a 
success ; the great statesman, the conqueror, the 
discoverer, are disguised in their creations until they 
are unrecognisable; the "work" of the artist, of the 
philosopher, only invents him who has created it, is 
reputed to have created it ; the " great men," as they 
are reverenced, are poor little fictions composed 
afterwards ; in the world of historical values 
spurious coinage prevails. Those great poets, for 
example, such as Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, 
Kleist, Gogol (I do not venture to mention much 
greater names, but I have them in my mind), as 



246 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

they now appear, and were perhaps obliged to be : 
men of the moment, enthusiastic, sensuous, and 
childish, light-minded and impulsive in their trust 
and distrust ; with souls in which usually some 
flaw has to be concealed ; often taking revenge with 
their works for an internal defilement, often seeking 
forgetfulness in their soaring from a too true 
memory, often lost in the mud and almost in 
love with it, until they become like the Will-o*- 
the-Wisps around the swamps, and pretend to be 
stars — the people then call them idealists, — often 
struggling with protracted disgust, with an ever-re- 
appearing phantom of disbelief, which makes them 
cold, and obliges them to languish for gloria and 
devour "faith as it is" out of the hands of in- 
toxicated adulators : — what a torment these great 
artists are and the so-called higher men in general, 
to him who has once found them out ! It is thus 
conceivable that it is just from woman — who is 
clairvoyant in the world of suffering, and also un- 
fortunately eager to help and save to an extent far 
beyond her powers — that they have learnt so readily 
those outbreaks of boundless devoted sympathy^ 
which the multitude, above all the reverent multi- 
tude, do not understand, and overwhelm with 
prying and self-gratifying interpretations. This 
sympathising invariably deceives itself as to its 
power ; woman would like to believe that love can 
do everything — it is the superstition peculiar to her. 
Alas, he who knows the heart finds out how poor, 
helpless, pretentious, and blundering even the best 
and deepest love is — he finds that it rather destroys 
than saves ! — It is possible that under the holy fable 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 247 

and travesty of the life of Jesus there is hidden one 
of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of 
knowledge about love: the martyrdom of the most 
innocent and most craving heart, that never had 
enough of any human love, that demanded love, that 
demanded inexorably and frantically to be loved 
and nothing else, with terrible outbursts against 
those who refused him their love ; the story of a 
poor soul insatiated and insatiable in love, that had 
to invent hell to send thither those who would not 
love him — and that at last, enlightened about 
human love, had to invent a God who is entire love, 
entire capacity for love — who takes pity on human 
love, because it is so paltry, so ignorant ! He who 
has such sentiments, he who has such knowledge 
about love — seeks for death ! — But why should one 
deal with such painful matters? Provided, of 
course, that one is not obliged to do so. 

270. 

The intellectual haughtiness and loathing of 
every man who has suffered deeply — it almost 
determines the order of rank how deeply men can 
suffer — the chilling certainty, with which he is 
thoroughly imbued and coloured, that by virtue of 
his suffering he knows more than the shrewdest and 
wisest can ever know, that he has been familiar 
with, and "at home" in, many distant, dreadful 
worlds of which ''you know nothing"! — this silent 
intellectual haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of 
the elect of knowledge, of the " initiated," of the 
almost sacrificed, finds all forms of disguise neces- 
sary to protect itself from contact with officious and 



248 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

sympathising hands, and in general from all that is 
not its equal in suffering. Profound suffering makes 
noble ; it separates. — One of the most refined forms 
of disguise is Epicurism, along with a certain 
ostentatious boldness of taste, which takes suffering 
lightly, and puts itself on the defensive against all 
that is sorrowful and profound. There are " gay 
men " who make use of gaiety, because they are 
misunderstood on account of it — they wish to be 
misunderstood. There are " scientific minds " who 
make use of science, because it gives a gay appear- 
ance, and because scientificalness leads to the con- 
clusion that a person is superficial — -they wish to 
mislead to a false conclusion. There are free 
insolent minds which would fain conceal and deny 
that they are broken, proud, incurable hearts (the 
cynicism of Hamlet — the case of Galiani) ; and 
occasionally folly itself is the mask of an unfortunate 
over-assured knowledge. — From which it follows 
that it is the part of a more refined humanity to 
have reverence " for the mask,'' and not to make 
use of psychology and curiosity in the wrong place. 

271. 
That which separates two men most profoundly 
is a different sense and grade of purity. What 
does it matter about all their honesty and reciprocal 
usefulness, what does it matter about all their 
mutual good-will : the fact still remains — they 
" cannot smell each other!*' The highest instinct 
for purity places him who is affected with it in the 
most extraordinary and dangerous isolation, as a 
saint : for it is just holiness — the highest spiritualisa- 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 249 

tion of the instinct in question. Any kind of 
cognisance of an indescribable excess in the joy of 
the bath, any kind of ardour or thirst which per- 
petually impels the soul out of night into the 
morning, and out of gloom, out of " affliction " into 
clearness, brightness, depth, and refinement : — ^just 
as much as such a tendency distinguishes— \X. is a 
noble tendency — it also separates. — The pity of the 
saint is pity for the filth of the human, all-too- 
human. And there are grades and heights where 
pity itself is regarded by him as impurity, as filth. 

272. 

Signs of nobility : never to think of lowering our 
duties to the rank of duties for everybody ; to be 
unwilling to renounce or to share our responsi- 
bilities ; to count our prerogatives, and the exercise 
of them, among our duties, 

273. 

A man who strives after great things, looks upon 
every one whom he encounters on his way either as 
a means of advance, or a delay and hindrance — or 
as a temporary resting-place. His peculiar lofty 
bounty to his fellow-men is only possible when he 
attains his elevation and dominates. Impatience, 
and the consciousness of being always condemned 
to comedy up to that time — for even strife is a 
comedy, and conceals the end, as every means 
does — spoil all intercourse for him ; this kind ot 
man is acquainted with solitude, and what is most 
poisonous in it. 



2SO BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

274. 

The Problem of those who Wait — Happy chances 
are necessary, and many incalculable elements, in 
order that a higher man in whom the solution of a 
problem is dormant, may yet take action, or " break 
forth," as one might say — at the right moment 
On an average it does not happen ; and in all 
corners of the earth there are waiting ones sittmg, 
who hardly know to what extent they are waiting, 
and still less that they wait in vain. Occasionally, 
too, the waking call comes too late — the chance 
which gives " permission " to take action — when 
their best youth, and strength for action have been 
used up in sitting still ; and how many a one, just 
as he " sprang up," has found with horror that his 
limbs are benumbed and his spirits are now too 
heavy ! " It is too late," he has said to himself — 
and has become self-distrustful and henceforth for 
ever useless. — In the domain of genius, may not the 
" Raphael without hands " (taking the expression 
in its widest sense) perhaps not be the exception, 
but the rule ? — Perhaps genius is by no means so 
rare : but rather the five hundred hands which it 
requires in order to tyrannise over the /<atpds, " the 
right time " — in order to take chance by the fore- 
lock! 

275. 

He who does not wish to see the height of a 
man, looks all the more sharply at what is low in 
him, and in the foreground — and thereby betrays 
himself. 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 251 

276. 

In all kinds of injury and loss the lower and 
coarser soul is better off than the nobler soul : the 
dangers of the latter must be greater, the pro- 
bability that it will come to grief and perish is in 
fact immense, considering the multiplicity of the 
conditions of its existence. — In a lizard a finger 
grows again which has been lost ; not so in man. — 

277. 

It is too bad ! Always the old story ! When a 
man has finished building his house, he finds that 
he has learnt unawares something which he ought 
absolutely to have known before he — began to 
build. The eternal, fatal " Too late ! " The melan- 
cholia of everything completed! — 

278. 

— Wanderer, who art thou? I see thee follow 
thy path without scorn, without love, with un- 
fathomable eyes, wet and sad as a plummet which 
has returned to the light insatiated out of every 
depth — what did it seek down there? — with a 
bosom that never sighs, with lips that conceal 
their loathing, with a hand which only slowly 
grasps : who art thou ? what hast thou done ? Rest 
thee here : this place has hospitality for every one — 
refresh thyself! And whoever thou art, what is it 
that now pleases thee ? What will serve to refresh 
thee ? Only name it, whatever I have I offer thee ! 
" To refresh me ? To refresh me ? Oh, thou prying 
one, what sayest thou ! But give me, I pray 



252 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

thee " What? what? Speak out! "Another 

mask ! A second mask ! " 



279. 

Men of profound sadness betray themselves when 
they are happy : they have a mode of seizing upon 
happiness as though they would choke and strangle 
it, out of jealousy — ah, they know only too well 
that it will flee from them ! 

280. 

" Bad ! Bad ! What ? Does he not— go back ? " 
Yes ! But you misunderstand him when you com- 
plain about it. He goes back like every one who 
is about to make a great spring. 

281. 

— "Will people believe it of me? But I insist 
that they believe it of me : I have always thought 
very unsatisfactorily of myself and about myself, 
only in very rare cases, only compulsorily, always 
without delight in *the subject,* ready to digress 
from 'myself,' and always without faith in the 
result, owing to an unconquerable distrust of the 
possibility of self-knowledge, which has led me so 
far as to feel a contradictio in adjecto even in the 
idea of 'direct knowledge' which theorists allow 
themselves : — this matter of fact is almost the most 
certain thing I know about myself. There must 
be a sort of repugnance in me to believe anything 
definite about myself. — Is there perhaps some 
enigma therein? Probably; but fortunately nothing 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 253 

for my own teeth. — Perhaps it betrays the species 
to which I belong? — but not to myself, as is 
sufficiently agreeable to me." 

282. 
— " But what has happened to you ? " — " I do 
not know," he said, hesitatingly ; " perhaps the 
Harpies have flown over my table." — It sometimes 
happens nowadays that a gentle, sober, retiring 
man becomes suddenly mad, breaks the plates, 
upsets the table, shrieks, raves, and shocks every- 
body — and finally withdraws, ashamed, and raging 
at himself — whither? for what purpose? To 
famish apart? To suffocate with his memories ? — 
To him who has the desires of a lofty and dainty 
soul, and only seldom finds his table laid and his 
food prepared, the danger will always be great — 
nowadays, however, it is extraordinarily so. Thrown 
into the midst of a noisy and plebeian age, with 
which he does not like to eat out of the same dish, 
he may readily perish of hunger and thirst — or, 
should he nevertheless finally " fall to," of sudden 
nausea. — We have probably all sat at tables to 
which we did not belong ; and precisely the most 
spiritual of us, who are most difficult to nourish, 
know the dangerous dyspepsia which originates 
from a sudden insight and disillusionment about 
our food and our messmates — the after-dinner 
nausea, 

283. 

if one wishes to praise at all, it is a delicate and 
at the same time a noble self-control, to praise only 



254 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

where one does not agree — otherwise in fact one 
would praise oneself, which is contrary to good 
taste : — a self-control, to be sure, which offers 
excellent opportunity and provocation to constant 
misunderstanding. To be able to allow oneself 
this veritable luxury of taste and morality, one 
must not live among intellectual imbeciles, but 
rather among men whose misunderstandings and 
mistakes amuse by their refinement — or one will 
have to pay dearly for it ! — " He praises me, there- 
fore he acknowledges me to be right " — this asinine 
method of inference spoils half of the life of us 
recluses, for it brings the asses into our neighbour- 
hood and friendship. 

284. 
To live in a vast and proud tranquillity ; always 
beyond . . . To have, or not to have, one's emo- 
tions, one's For and Against, according to choice; 
to lower oneself to them for hours ; to seat oneself 
on them as upon horses, and often as upon asses : — 
for one must know how to make use of their 
stupidity as well as of their fire. To conserve one's 
three hundred foregrounds ; also one's black spec- 
tacles : for there are circumstances when nobody 
must look into our eyes, still less into our " motives." 
And to choose for company that roguish and 
cheerful vice, politeness. And to remain master 
of one's four virtues, courage, insight, sympathy, 
and solitude. For solitude is a virtue with us, as 
a sublime bent and bias to purity, which divines 
that in the contact of man and man — "in society" 
— it must be unavoidably impure. All society 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 255 

makes one somehow, somewhere, or sometime — 
" commonplace." 

285. 

The greatest events and thoughts — the greatest 
thoughts, however, are the greatest events — are 
longest in being comprehended : the generations 
which are contemporary with them do not experi- 
ence such events — they live past them. Something 
happens there as in the realm of the stars. The 
light of the furthest stars is longest in reaching 
man ; and before it has arrived man denies — that 
there are stars there. " How many centuries does 
a mind require to be understood ? " — that is also a 
standard, one also makes a gradation of rank and 
an etiquette therewith, such as is necessary for mind 
and for star. 

286. 

" Here is the prospect free, the mind exalted." * 
— But there is a reverse kind of man, who is also 
upon a height, and has also a free prospect — but 
looks downwards. 

287. 

— What is noble ? What does the word " noble " 
still mean for us nowadays ? How does the noble 
man betray himself, how is he recognised under 
this heavy overcast sky of the commencing plebeian- 
ism, by which everything is rendered opaque and 

* Goethe's "Faust," Part II., Act V. The words of Dr 
Marianus. 



2S6 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

leaden ? — It is not his actions which establish his 
claim — actions are always ambiguous, always in- 
scrutable ; neither is it his " works." One finds 
nowadays among artists and scholars plenty of 
those who betray by their works that a profound 
longing for nobleness impels them ; but this very 
need of nobleness is radically different from the 
needs of the noble soul itself, and is in fact the 
eloquent and dangerous sign of the lack thereof. 
It is not the works, but the belief which is here 
decisive and determines the order of rank — to em- 
ploy once more an old religious formula with a 
new and deeper meaning, — it is some fundamental 
certainty which a noble soul has about itself, some- 
thing which is not to be sought, is not to be 
found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost. — T'he 
noble soul has reverence for itself — 



288. 

There are men who are unavoidably intellectual, 
let them turn and twist themselves as they will, 
and hold their hands before their treacherous eyes 
— as though the hand were not a betrayer; it 
always comes out at last that they have something 
which they hide — namely, intellect. One of the 
subtlest means of deceiving, at least as long as 
possible, and of successfully representing oneself to 
be stupider than one really is — which in everyday 
life is often as desirable as an umbrella, — is called 
enthusiasm, including what belongs to it, for in- 
stance, virtue. For as Galiani said, who was 
obliged to know it : vertu est enthousiastne. 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 257 

289. 

In the writings of a recluse one always hears 
something of the echo of the wilderness, something 
of the murmuring tones and timid vigilance of soli- 
tude ; in his strongest words, even in his cry itself, 
there sounds a new and more dangerous kind of 
silence, of concealment. He who has sat day and 
night, from year's end to year's end, alone with his 
soul in familiar discord and discourse, he who has 
become a cave-bear, or a treasure-seeker, or a 
treasure-guardian and dragon in his cave — it may 
be a labyrinth, but can also be a gold-mine — his 
ideas themselves eventually acquire a twilight- 
colour of their own, and an odour, as much of the 
depth as of the mould, something uncommunicative 
and repulsive, which blows chilly upon every passer- 
by. The recluse does not believe that a philo- 
sopher — supposing that a philosopher has always 
in the first place been a recluse — ever expressed 
his actual and ultimate opinions in books : are not 
books written precisely to hide what is in us? 
— indeed, he will doubt whether a philosopher can 
have " ultimate and actual " opinions at all ; whether 
behind every cave in him there is not, and must 
necessarily be, a still deeper cave : an ampler, 
stranger, richer world beyond the surface, an abyss 
behind every bottom, beneath every " foundation." 
Every philosophy is a foreground philosophy — this 
is a recluse's verdict: " There is something arbitrary 
in the fact that the philosopher came to a stand 
here, took a retrospect and looked around ; that he 
here laid his spade aside and did not dig any 

R 



25 8 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

deeper — there is also something suspicious in it." 
Every philosophy also conceals a philosophy ; every 
opinion is also a lurking-place ^ every word is also a 
mask, 

290. 
Every deep thinker is more afraid of being 
understood than of being misunderstood. The 
latter perhaps wounds his vanity ; but the former 
wounds his heart, his sympathy, which always says : 
" Ah, why would ^^^ also have as hard a time of it 
as I have ? " 

291. 
Man, a complex^ mendacious, artful, and inscrut- 
able animal, uncanny to the other animals by his 
artifice and sagacity, rather than by his strength, 
has invented the good conscience in order finally 
to enjoy his soul as something simple ; and the 
whole of morality is a long, audacious falsification, 
by virtue of which generally enjoyment at the sight 
of the soul becomes possible. From this point of 
view there is perhaps much more in the conception 
of " art " than is generally believed. 

292. 
A philosopher : that is a man who constantly 
ex])eriences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and dreams 
extraordinary things ; who is struck by his own 
thoughts as if they came from the outside, from 
above and below,as a species of events and lightning- 
flashes peculiar to him ; who is perhaps himself a 
storm pregnant with new lightnings ; a portentous 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 259 

man, around whom there is always rumbling and 
mumbling and gaping and something uncanny 
going on. A philosopher : alas, a being who often 
runs away from himself, is often afraid of him- 
self — but whose curiosity always makes him " come 
to himself" again. 

293. 

A man who says : " I like that, I take it for 
my own, and mean to guard and protect it from 
every one"; a man who can conduct a case, carry 
out a resolution, remain true to an opinion, keep 
hold of a woman, punish and overthrow insolence ; 
a man who has his indignation and his sword, and 
to whom the weak, the suffering, the oppressed, 
and even the animals willingly submit and naturally 
belong ; in short, a man who is a master by nature 
— when such a man has sympathy, well ! that 
sympathy has value ! But of what account is the 
sympathy of those who suffer ! Or of those even 
who preach sympathy ! There is nowadays, 
throughout almost the whole of Europe, a sickly 
irritability and sensitiveness towards pain, and also 
a repulsive irrestrainableness in complaining, an 
effeminising, which, with the aid of religion and 
philosophical nonsense, seeks to deck itself out as 
something superior — there is a regular cult of 
suffering. The unmanliness of that which is called 
^* sympathy" by such groups of visionaries, is 
always, I believe, the first thing that strikes the 
eye. — One must resolutely and radically taboo this 
latest form of bad taste ; and finally I wish people 
to put the good amulet, ^^ gat saber" ("gay science," 



26o BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

in ordinary language), on heart and neck, as a pro- 
tection against it. 

294. 

The Olympian Vice. — Despite the philosopher 
who, as a genuine Englishman, tried to bring 
laughter into bad repute in all thinking minds — 
" Laughing is a bad infirmity of human nature, 
which every thinking mind will strive to overcome " 
(Hobbes), — I would even allow myself to rank 
philosophers according to the quality of their 
laughing — up to those who are capable of golden 
laughter. And supposing that Gods also philo- 
sophise, which I am strongly inclined to believe, 
owing to many reasons — I have no doubt that they 
also know how to laugh thereby in an overman- 
like and new fashion — and at the expense of all 
serious things ! Gods are fond of ridicule : it 
seems that they cannot refrain from laughter even 
in holy matters. 

295. 

The genius of the heart, as that great mysterious 
one possesses it, the tempter-god and born rat- 
catcher of consciences, whose voice can descend 
into the nether-world of every soul, who neither 
speaks a word nor casts a glance in which there 
may not be some motive or touch of allurement, 
to whose perfection it pertains that he knows how 
to appear, — not as he is, but in a guise which 
acts as an additional constraint on his followers to 
press ever closer to him, to follow him more cordially 
and thoroughly ;— the genius of the heart, which 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 261 

imposes silence and attention on everything loud 
and self-conceited, which smooths rough souls and 
makes them taste a new longing — to lie placid as a 
mirror, that the deep heavens may be reflected in 
them ; — the genius of the heart, which teaches the 
clumsy and too hasty hand to hesitate, and to grasp 
more delicately ; which scents the hidden and for- 
gotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet 
spirituality under thick dark ice, and is a divining- 
rod for every grain of gold, long buried and im- 
prisoned in mud and sand ; the genius of the heart, 
from contact with which every one goes away richer ; 
not favoured or surprised, not as though gratified 
and oppressed by the good things of others; but 
richer in himself, newer than before, broken up, 
blown upon, and sounded by a thawing wind; more 
uncertain perhaps, more delicate, more fragile, more 
bruised, but full of hopes which as yet lack names, 
full of a new will and current, full of a new ill-will 
and counter-current . . . but what am I doing, my 
friends ? Of whom am I talking to you ? Have 
I forgotten myself so far that I have not even told 
you his name ? Unless it be that you have already 
divined of your own accord who this questionable 
God and spirit is, that wishes to be praised in such 
a manner ? For, as it happens to every one who 
from childhood onward has always been on his 
legs, and in foreign lands, I have also encountered 
on my path many strange and dangerous spirits ; 
above all, however, and again and again, the one 
of whom I have just spoken : in fact, no less a 
personage than the God Dionysus, the great equi- 
vocator and tempter, to whom, as you know, I once 



262 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

offered in all secrecy and reverence my first-fruits 
— the last, as it seems to me, who has offered a 
sacrifice to him, for I have found no one who could 
understand what I was then doing. In the mean- 
time, however, I have learned much, far too much, 
about the philosophy of this God, and, as I said, 
from mouth to mouth — I, the last disciple and 
initiate of the God Dionysus : and perhaps I might 
at last begin to give you, my friends, as far as I am 
allowed, a little taste of this philosophy? In a 
hushed voice, as is but seemly: for it has to do 
with much that is secret, new, strange, wonderful, 
and uncanny. The very fact that Dionysus is a 
philosopher, and that therefore Gods also philo- 
sophise, seems to me a novelty which is not unen- 
snaring, and might perhaps arouse suspicion pre- 
cisely amongst philosophers ; — amongst you, my 
friends, there is less to be said against it, except 
that it comes too late and not at the right time ; 
for, as it has been disclosed to me, you are loth now- 
adays to believe in God and gods. It may happen, 
too, that in the frankness of my story I must go 
further than is agreeable to the strict usages of your 
ears ? Certainly the God in question went further, 
very much further, in such dialogues, and was 
always many paces ahead of me. . . . Indeed, if it 
were allowed, I should have to give him, according 
to human usage, fine ceremonious titles of lustre 
and merit, I should have to extol his courage as 
investigator and discoverer, his fearless honesty, 
truthfulness, and love of wisdom. But such a God 
does not know what to do with all that respectable 
trumpery and pomp. " Keep that,'' he would say, 



WHAT IS NOBLE? 263 

" for thyself and those like thee, and whoever else 
require it ! I — have no reason to cover my naked- 
ness ! '* One suspects that this kind of divinity and 
philosopher perhaps lacks shame ? — He once said : 
" Under certain circumstances I love mankind " — 
and referred thereby to Ariadne, who was present ; 
" in my opinion man is an agreeable, brave, in- 
ventive animal, that has not his equal upon earth, 
he makes his way even through all labyrinths. I 
like man, and often think how I can still further 
advance him, and make him stronger, more evil, 
and more profound." — " Stronger, more evil, and 
more profound ? " I asked in horror. " Yes,'* he said 
again, " stronger, more evil, and more profound ; 
also more beautiful " — and thereby the tempter-god 
smiled with his halcyon smile, as though he had 
just paid some charming compliment. One here 
sees at once that it is not only shame that this 
divinity lacks ; — and in general there are good 
grounds for supposing that in some things the 
Gods could all of them come to us men for in- 
struction. We men are — more human. — 

296. 

Alas! what are you, after all, my written and 
painted thoughts ! Not long ago you were so 
variegated, young, and malicious, so full of thorns 
and secret spices, that you made me sneeze and 
laugh — and now ? You have already doffed your 
novelty, and some of you, 1 fear, are ready to 
become truths, so immortal do they look, so 
pathetically honest, so tedious ! And was it ever 
otherwise ? What then do we write and paint, we 



264 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

mandarins with Chinese brush, we immortah'sers of 
things which lend themselves to writing, what are 
we alone capable of painting? Alas, only that 
which is just about to fade and begins to lose its 
odour ! Alas, only exhausted and departing storms 
and belated yellow sentiments ! Alas, only birds 
strayed and fatigued by flight, which now let 
themselves be captured with the hand — with our 
hand ! We immortalise what cannot live and fly 
much longer, things only which are exhausted and 
mellow ! And it is only for your afternoon^ you, 
my written and painted thoughts, for which alone 
I have colours, many colours perhaps, many varie- 
gated softenings, and fifty yellows and browns and 
greens and reds ; — but nobody will divine thereby 
how ye looked in your morning, you sudden sparks 
and marvels of my solitude, you, my old, beloved — 
evil thoughts 1 



EPODE. 

FROM LOFTY MOUNTAINS. 

O NOON of life ! Delightful garden land ! 

Fair summer station ! 
O, restless bliss in watchful expectation : — 
For friends I wait — both day and night attend. 
Where are ye, friends ? Oh, come ! The time 's at 
hand ! 

Doth not for you to-day the glacier hoar, 

Bedeck with roses ? 
The brooklet seeks you ; longing for you poses 
The breeze-tossed cloud still loftier than of yore — 
— To spy you out — where highest eagles soar. 

Aloft for you my board is bounteous spread : — 

Whose habitation 
So nigh both gulf and starry constellation? 
What sovereign e'er o'er wider realms did tread ? 
My fragrant honey — whom hath it e'er fed ? 

— Ye come^ my friends ! but ah, how / belie 

Your expectation ? 
Ye stop, amazed ! — better were indignation ! 
Fm — he no more ? Changed gait and face and eye> 
No more to you the signs of friend imply ? 



266 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

Another now, with my first self compared, 

Aye self-outgrowing ? 
A wrestler, also, oft self-overthrowing ? 
Too oft 'gainst his own force with war declared, 
By his own victory wounded and impaired ? 



I sought the place where blew the sharpest air ; 

There chose my dwelling, 
Where no one dwelt — those ice-bear zones repel- 
ling ; 
Unlearned man and God and curse and prayer, 
Became a ghost haunting the glaciers bare ? 

— ^Ye friends of old, whose pallid faces peep, 

With love and terror ! 
Forgive me ! Go !— To lodge here — were an error. 
Amidst such realms of ice, and rocks so steep, 
One must a hunter be, — like chamois leap. 

Tm now a hunter vicious ! — See how tight 

My bow is straining ; 
The strongest only such a force attaining ! 
But ah ! Dangerous is now that arrow's might. 
More than all arrows ! Hence, be safe in flight ! . . . 

Ye go ? O heart, enough thou hadst to bear — 

Thy hope remaining : 
Thy doors keep open now, 7tew friends attaining ! 
Let go the old, nor for past memories care ! 
Once young — thou yet hast better youth to spare ! 



FROM LOFTY MOUNTAINS. 267 

What ever bound us, common hope's bless'd bond — 

Who reads signs pallid, 
Which love once wrote thereon in symbols hal- 
lowed ? 
To parchment I compare it, which the hand 
Unwilling grasps, — it soils and makes a brand. 

Thus friends no more ; they are — what name have 

they ? 

Friends' apparitions ! 
They haunt my door and heart for recognitions ; 
They look at me, " Friends we were once ? " they 

say: 
— O withered word, like fragrant rose decay ! 



O youthful longing, liable to stray ! 

Friends / desired. 
Whom changed I deemed, and like to me Inspired, — 
Advancing age hath banished them away : — 
Who change can only 'mong my kindred stay. 

O noon of life ! A second youthful land ! 

Fair summer station ! 
O, restless bliss in watchful expectation : — 
For friends I wait — both day and night attend, — 
For the new friends ! Oh, come ! The time 's at 
hand! 



268 BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. 

This song is o'er, — the longings' sweet refrain 

Ceased with good reason : 
By charmer's spell, the friend at the right season, 
The noonday friend — but why should I explain — 
It was at noon when one was changed to twain. . . 

We celebrate, now sure of conquering might. 

The grandest lustra : — 
The guest of guests arrived, friend Zarathustra ! 
The world now smiles, rent is the veil of night — 
The marriage of the darkness and the light. • . • 



THE WORKS OF 

Friedrich Nietzsche 

The Authorized English and American Edition, to be complete in eleven volumes, 
translated by different hands, is issued under the general supervision ol 
Prof. Alexander Tille, of Glasgow, Lecturer in German Language and 
Literature at the University of Glasgow, Author of "Von Darwin bis 
Nietzsche," etc. 
The volumes now ready are in their order of issue : — 

THE CASE OF WAGNER; THE TWILIGHT 
IDOLS; NIETZSCHE CONTRA WAGNER; 
THE ANTICHRIST 

Volume XI, cloth, $2 

Translated by THOMAS COMMON. 

THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA: A Book of All 

AND None 

Volume VIII, cloth, $2.^0 

Translated by ALEXANDER TiLLE, Ph.D. 

A GENEALOGY OF MORALS: Poems 

Volume X, cloth, $2 
Translated by WILLIAM A. Haussmann, Ph.D. 

THE DAWN OF DAY (Morgenrothen) 

Volume VI, cloth, $2,^0 net 
Translated by Johanna Volz. 

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL 

Volume IX, just ready, cloth, $2,50 net 
Translated by Helen Zimmern. 

Others in Preparation 



Friedrich Nietzsche, Ph.D., is one of the most prominent representatives of 
that movement of contemporary opinion to which Huxley gave the name of the 
New Reformation. Within the last ten years he has acquired an influence over 
modern Continental culture equalled by no philosopher since Hegel. His works 
have created an independent school of thought; and in Germany, Austria, Hol- 
land, France, and Scandinavia a whole literature has sprung into existence bear- 
ing directly upon his work. 

The questions he has raised are the problems of our time imperiously demanding 
solution. It is no longer possible to neglect and avoid them ; it is preferable to 
look them straight in the face, and to accept as the foundation of all our opera- 
tions those new factors which, as Nietzsche shows, have now become inevitable. 
Perhaps the wide outlook into the future of mankind which he has opened up 
may help to lead the race to its final goal. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YOKE 



AN IMPORTANT RECENT WORK 

Concepts of Philosophy 

By ALEXANDER THOMAS ORMOND 

McCosh Professor of Philosophy in Princeton University ; Author of 
" Foundations of Knowledge " 

Cloih^ 8vo, 717 pages and index, $4.00 net 

The Outlook says : 

" Had not the title * Synthetic Philosophy * been preempted by Herbert 
Spencer, Dr. Ormond might well have chosen it as descriptive of this 
masterly treatise, in which he develops the psycho-centric view of the 
world in opposition to the hylo-centric view of materialism. The core 
of his work, its largest section, exhibits the synthetic construction pro- 
ceeding from physics to sociality, and from sociality to religion in its 
recognition of the ' all-including Self,' whom we name God. The oppos- 
ing tendencies of religious thought, inevitable as they are — on one hand 
to personify God, on the other hand a feeling of His transcendence — are 
ever clarifying crude conceptions of Him, but never reaching a final 
definition of the divine nature. Clear and straight thinking characterizes 
Dr. Ormond's work throughout. In its synthetic philosophy not only 
science and metaphysics, but also science and religion, find their unity." 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Foundations of Knowledge 



PART I. Ground Concepts of Knowledge. 

PART II. Evolution of the Categories of Knowledge. 
PART III. The Transcendent Facts in Knowledge. 

In one volume^ cloth, Svo, $3,00 net 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 



OTHER WORKS ON PHILOSOPHY 

PUBLISHED BY 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY, or, Principles of 
Epistemology and Metaphysics 

By James Hervey Hyslop, formerly Professor of Logic and 
Ethics^ Columbia University, 8vo, cloth, ^5.00 net 

AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY 

By George Stuart Fullerton, Professor of Philosophy in 
Columbia University, i2mo, cloth, 345 pages, ;^i.6o net 

THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY 

By Harold Hoffding. Translated by Galen M. Fisher, with a 
Preface by William James. i6mo, cloth, ^i.oo net 

AN INTRODUCTION TO SYSTEMATIC 

PHILOSOPHY 

By Walter T. Marvin, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Western 
Reserve University, 8vo, cloth, fe.oo net 

A STUDENT'S HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 

By Arthur Kenyon Rogers, Professor of Philosophy in Butler 
College. 8vo, cloth, ;^2.oo net 

AN OUTLINE OF PHILOSOPHY. With Notes, His- 
torical and Critical. 

By John Watson, Professor of Moral Philosophy ^ Queen* s Univer- 
sity, Kingston, Canada. i2mo, cloth, ^2.25 net 

A HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. With Especial Ref- 
erence to the Formation and Development of its Problems 
and Conceptions. 

By Dr. W. WiNDELBAND, Professor of Philosophy in the Univer- 
sity of Strassburg. Authorized Translation by James H. Tufts, 
Professor of Philosophy in the University of Chicago. 

Svo, cloth, ^.00 net 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT, and Other Philo- 
sophical Lectures and Essays 

By the late HENRY SiDGWiCK, Knightsbridge Professor of Moral 
Philosophy, University of Cambridge, 

10+475 PP'» 8vo, cloth, $3.25 net 



THE LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY 

Edited by J. H. MUIRHEAD, M.A. 
Large 8vo 



A History of Philosophy. By Johann Eduard Erdmann, edited by 
WiLLSTON S. Hough, Ph. M., Assistant Professor of Philosophy in 
the University of Minnesota. j vols. $10.50 net, 

"A splendid monument of patient labor, critical acumen, and admirable 
methodical treatment. ... It is not too much to predict that, for the library of 
the savaftt, for the academical student, whose business it is to be primed in the 
wisdom of the ages, and for the literary dilettante, who is nothing if not well up 
in * things that everybody ought to know,' these volumes will at once become a 
necessity for purposes, at least, of reference, if not of actual study. . . . We 
possess nothing that can bear any comparison with it in point of completeness. 

— Pall Mall Gazette. 

History of -ffisthetic. By Bernard Bosanqtjet, LL.D. $2.'j5 net. 

'* In clearness, precision, and in power to interest and stir his hearers, Mr. 
Bosanquet proved as eflfective a teacher as England has ever sent across the sea. 
His ability as a thinker has been familiar to American students through his work 
on Logic, which takes high rank as an authority." — Science. 

Development of Theology in Germany since Kant, and in Great Britain 

since 1825. By OTTO Pfleiderer, D.D. $2.^5 net. 

" We do not know where to turn for a statement of their contributions to 

religious thought which is more scholarly, and which shows a larger insight into 

the relations of speculative thought." — Boston Herald. 

Philosophy and Political Economy in Some of their Historical Rela- 
tions. By James Bonar, M.A., LL.D. $2.^5 net. 
" His work is much to be commended; it is full of instructive detail; the style 
is sober and careful; and the index is all that an index should be." 

— The Critical Review. 

Appearance and Reality. A Metaphysical Essay. By F. H. 
Bradley, LL.D. ^2.75 net. 

'* The author is a distinguished logician and thinker, and it can be assumed 
that his book is worthy the attention of those interested in mental science." 

— Boston Transcript. 

Analytic Psychology. By G. F. Stout, M.A. 2 vols. $5.50 net. 

Natural Rights. A Criticism of Some Political and Ethical Concep- 
tions. By David G. Ritchie, M.A., Professor of Logic and 
Metaphysics in the University of St. Andrews. $2.75 net, 

" In his criticisms of the natural rights theory he is acute and satisfying." 

— Nation. 
Logic. By Dr. Christoph Sigwart, Professor of Philosophy at the 
University of Tiibingen. Translated by Helen Dendy. Second 
Edition, revised and enlarged. Vol. I. The Judgment, Concept, 
and Inference. Vol.11. Logical Methods. 

2 vols. Each volume, cloth, large 8vo, $5.50 net. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 

H 125 82 ii 








"^ 'I.'^' <^:*. ^^ ♦WW* >^ V" .'•»- 'o. 














"1^ 




